I still could not bring myself to speak, not until we were well away from that place. If the monkey had any sense, it was already through the narrowing, on its way back to daylight.
But when we reached the junction, the intersection of four tunnels, Rasht made us halt.
“Kanto’s taken the wrong one,” he said.
In the chaos of footprints, there was no chance at all of picking out the individual trace of the monkey. I was about to say as much when Rasht spoke again.
“I have a trace on his suit. In case he…escaped.” The word seemed distasteful to him, as if it clarified an aspect of their relationship best kept hidden. “He should be ahead of us now, but he isn’t. He’s behind again. Down this shaft, I think.” Rasht was indicating the rightmost entrance of the three we had faced on our way in. “It’s hard to know.”
Lenka said in a low voice: “Then we have to leave. Kanto will find his own way out, once he knows he’s gone the wrong way.”
“She’s right,” I said.
“We can’t leave him,” Rasht said. “We won’t. I won’t allow it.”
“If the monkey doesn’t want to be found,” I said, “nothing we do is going to make any difference.”
“The fix isn’t moving. I have a distance estimate. It isn’t more than twenty or thirty metres down that tunnel.”
“Or that one,” I said, nodding to the middle shaft. “Or your fix is wrong, and he’s ahead of us anyway. For all we know, the magnetic field is screwing up your tracker.”
“He isn’t behind us,” Rasht said, doggedly ignoring me. “There are really only two possibilities. We can check them quickly, three of us. Eliminate the wrong shaft.”
Lenka’s own breathing was now as heavy as my own. I caught another glimpse of her face, eyes wide with apprehension. “I know he means a lot to you, Captain…”
“Is there something wrong with your suits?” I asked.
“Yes,” Lenka said. “Mine, anyway. Losing locomotive assist. Same as happened to you.”
“I’m not sure it’s the same thing. I fell in the pool, you didn’t. Can you still move?”
Lenka lifted up an arm, clenched and unclenched her hand. “For the time being. If it gets too bad, I can always go full manual.” Then she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and reopened them. “All right, Captain.” This with a particular sarcastic emphasis. “I’ll check out the middle tunnel, if it’ll help. I’ll go thirty metres, no more, and turn around. You can check out the one on your right, if you think Kanto’s gone that way. Nidra can wait here, just in case Kanto’s gone ahead of us and turns back.”
I did not like the idea of spending ten more seconds in this place, let alone the time it would take to inspect the tunnels. But Lenka’s suggestion made the best of a bad situation. It would appease the Captain and not delay us more than a few minutes.
“All right,” I agreed. “I’ll wait here. But don’t count on me catching Kanto if he comes back.”
“Stay where you are, my dear,” Rasht said, addressing the monkey wherever it might be. “We are coming.”
Lenka and Rasht disappeared into their respective tunnels, their suits moving with visible sluggishness. Lenka, whose suit was more lightly armoured, would find it easier to cope than Rasht. I speculated to myself that the silver contamination was indeed having some effect, but that my exposure to the pond’s microorganisms had provided a barriering layer, a kind of inocculation. It was not much of a theory, but I had nothing better to offer.
I counted a minute, then two.
Then heard: “Nidra.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I hear you, Lenka. Have you found the monkey?”
There was a silence that ate centuries. My own fear was now as sharp and clean and precise as a surgical instrument. I could feel every cruel edge of it, cutting me open from inside.
“Help me.”
YOU CAME BACK then. You’d found your stupid fucking monkey. You were cradling it, holding it to you like it was the most precious thing in your universe.
Actually I do the monkey a disservice.
As stupid as he was, Kanto was innocent in all this. I thought he was dead to begin with, but then I realised that it was trembling, caught in a state of infant terror, clinging to the fixed certainty of you while he shivered in its armour.
I made out his close-set yellow eyes, wide and uncomprehending.
I loathed your fucking monkey. But there was nothing that deserved that sort of terror.
Do you remember how our conversation played out? I told you that Lenka was in trouble. Your loyal crewmember, good, dependable Lenka. Always there for you. Always there for the Lachrimosa. No matter what had happened until that point, there was now only one imperative. We had to save her. This is what Ultras do. When one of us falls, we reach. We’re better than people think.
But not you.
The fear had finally worked its way into you. I was wrong about greed being stronger. Or rather, there are degrees. Greed trumps fear, but then a deeper fear trumps greed all over again.
I pleaded with you.
But you would not answer her call. You left with Kanto, hobbling your way back to safety.
You left me to find Lenka.
I DID NOT have to go much further down the tunnel and reached the thing blocking further progress. It had trapped Lenka, but she was not yet fully part of it. Teterev had come earlier—many years ago—so her degree of intregration was much more pronounced. I could judge this in a glance, even before I had any deeper understanding of what I had found. I knew that Lenka would succumb to Teterev’s fate, and that if I remained in this place I would eventually join them.
“Come closer, Nidra,” a voice said.
I stepped nearer, hardly daring to bring the full blaze of my helmet light to bear on the half-sensed obstruction ahead of me.
“I’ve come for Lenka. Whatever you are, whatever’s happened to you, let her go.”
“We’ll speak of Lenka.” The voice was loud, booming across the air between us. “But do come closer.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Because you are frightened?”
“Yes.”
“Then I am very glad to hear it. Fear is the point of this place. Fear is the last and best thing that we have.”
“We?”
“My predecessors and I. Those who came before me, the wayfarers and the lost. We’ve been coming for a very long time. Century after century, across hundreds of thousands of years. Unthinkable ages of galactic time. Drawn to this one place, and repelled by it—as you nearly were.”
“I wish we had been.”
“And usually the fear is sufficient. They turn back before they get this deep, as you nearly did. As you should have done. But you were braver than most. I’m sorry that your courage carried you as far as it did.”
“It wasn’t courage.” But then I added: “How do you know my name?”
“I listened to your language, from the moment you entered me. You are very noisy! You gibber and shriek and make no sense whatsoever.”
“Are you Teterev?”
“That is not easily answered. I remember Teterev, and I feel her distinctiveness quite strongly. Sometimes I speak through her, sometimes she speaks through us. We have all enjoyed what Teterev has brought to us.”
I had never met Teterev, never seen an image of her, but there were only two human figures before me and one of them was Lenka, jammed into immobility, strands of silver beginning to wrap and bind her suit as if in the early stages of mummification. The strands extended back to the larger form of which Teterev was only an embellishment.
She must still have been wearing her suit when she was trapped and bound. Traces of the suit remained, but much of it had been picked off her, detached or dissolved or remade into the larger mass. Her helmet, similar in design to the one we had seen in the wreck, had fissured in two, with its halves framing her head.
I thought of flytrap mouthparts, Teterev�
�s head an insect. Her face was stony and unmoving, her eyes blank surfaces, but there was no hint of ageing or decay. Her skin had the pearly shimmer of the figures we had seen in the second chamber. She had become—or was becoming—something other than flesh.
But apart from Teterev—and Lenka, if you included her—none of the other forms were human. The blockage was an assemblage of fused shapes, creature after creature absorbed into a sort of interlocking stone puzzle, a jigsaw of jumbled anatomies and half-implied life-support technologies. Two or three of the creatures were loosely humanoid, in so far as their forms could be discerned. But it was hard to gauge where their suits and life-support mechanisms ended and their alien anatomies commenced. Vines and tendrils of silver smothered them from head to foot, binding them into the older layers of the mass. Beyond these recognisable forms lay the evidence of many stranger anatomies and technologies.
“I’ve heard of a plague,” I said, making my way to Lenka. “They say it’s all just rumour, but I don’t know. Is this what happened to you?”
“There are a million plagues, some worse than others. Some much worse.” There was an edge of playfulness in the voice, taking droll amusement in my ignorance. “No: what you see here is deliberate, done for our mutual benefit. Haphazard, yes, but organised for a purpose. Think of it as a form of defense.”
“Against the outside world?” I had my hands on her suit now, and I tried to rip the silver strands away from it, while at the same time applying as much force as I could to drag Lenka back to safety.
The voice said: “Nothing like that. I am a barrier against the thing that would damage the outside world, were it to be released.”
“Then I don’t understand.” I caught my breath, already drained by the effort of trying to free her. “Is Lenka going to become part of you? Is that the idea?”
“Would you sooner offer yourself? Is that what you would like?”
“I’d like you to let Lenka go.” Realising I was getting nowhere—the strands reattached themselves as quickly I peeled them away—I could only step back and take stock. “She came back here to find the monkey, not to hurt you. None of us came to harm you. We just wanted to know what had happened to Teterev.”
“So Teterev was the beginning and end of your concerns? You had no other interest in this place?”
“We wondered what was in the cave,” I answered, seeing no value in lying, even if I thought I might have got away with it. “We thought there might be Amerikano relics, maybe a Conjoiner cache. We picked up the geomagnetic anomaly. Are you making that happen? If so, you can’t blame us for noticing it. If you don’t want visitors, try making yourself less visible!”
“I would, if it were within my means. Shall I tell you something of me, Nidra? Then we will speak of Lenka.”
SHALL I TELL you what I learned from her, Captain? Will that take your mind off the cold, for a little while?
You may as well hear it. It will put things into perspective. Make you understand your place in things—the value in your being here. The good and selfless service you are about to commence.
She was traveller, too.
Not Teterev, but the original one—the first being, the first entity, to find this planet. A spacefarer. Admittedly this was all quite a long time ago. She tried to get me to understand, but I’m not sure I have the imagination. Whole galactic turns ago, she said. When some of the stars we see now were not even born, and the old ones were younger. When the universe itself was smaller than it is now. Young galaxies crowding each other’s heavens.
I don’t know if it was her, an effect of the magnetic field, or just my fears affecting my sense of self. But as she spoke of abyssal time, I felt a lurch of cosmic vertigo, a sense that I stood on the crumbling brink of time’s plungeing depths.
I didn’t want to fall, didn’t want to topple.
Sensible advice for both of us, wouldn’t you say?
The universe always feels old, though. That’s a universal truth, a universal fact of life. It felt old for her, already cobwebbed by history. Hard for us to grasp, I know. Human civilisation, it’s just the last scratch on the last scratch on the last scratch, on the last layer of everything. We’re noise. Dirt. We haven’t begun to leave a trace.
But for her, so much had already happened! There had still been time enough for the rise and fall of numberless species and civilisations, time for great deeds and greater atrocities. Time for monsters and the rumours of worse.
She had been journeying for lifetimes, by the long measure of her species. Travelling close to light, visiting world after world.
If we had a name for what she was, we’d call her an archaeologist, a scholar drawn to relics and scraps.
Still following me?
One day—one unrecorded century—she stumbles upon something. It was a thing she’d half hoped to find, half hoped to avoid. Glory and annihilation, balanced on a knife edge.
We know all about that, don’t we?
Your finger is moving. Are you trying to adjust that temperature setting? Go ahead. Turn up your suit. I won’t stop you.
There. Better already. Can you feel the warmth flowing up from your neck ring, taking the sting out of the cold? It feels better, doesn’t it? There’s plenty of power in the suit. You needn’t worry about draining it. Make yourself as warm as you wish.
Look, I didn’t say there wasn’t a catch.
Turn it down, then. Let the cold return. Can you feel those skin cells dying, the frostbite eating its way into your face? Can you feel your eyeballs starting to freeze?
Back to our traveller.
We have rumours of plague. She had rumours of something far worse. A presence, an entity, waiting between the stars. Older than the history of any culture known to her kind. A kind of mechanism, waiting to detect the emergence of bright and busy civilisations such as hers. Or ours, for that matter.
Something with a mind and a purpose.
And she found it.
“I’VE NO REASON to think you haven’t already killed Lenka,” I said, a kind of desperate calm overcoming me, when I realised how narrow my options really were.
“Oh, she is perfectly well,” the voice answered. “Her suit is frozen, and I have pushed channels of myself into her head, to better learn her usefulness. But she is otherwise intact. She has travelled well, this Lenka. I can learn a great deal from her.”
I waited a beat.
“Are you strong?”
“That is an odd question.”
“Not really.” I reached beneath my chest pack, fumbling with my equipment belt until I found the hard casing of a demolition charge. I unclipped the grenade-sized device, presenting it before me like an offering. “Hot dust. Have you dug deep enough into Lenka to know what that means?”
“No, but Teterev knew.”
“That’s good. And what did Teterev know?”
“That you have a matter-antimatter device.”
“That’s right.”
“And the yield would be…?”
“A couple of kilotonnes. Very small, really. Barely enough to chip an asteroid in two. Of course, I have no idea of the damage it would do to you.”
I used two hands to twist the charge open along its midline, exposing its triggering system. The trigger was a gleaming red disk. I settled my thumb over the disk, thinking of the tiny, pollen-sized speck of antimatter held in a flawless vacuum at the heart of the demolition charge.
“Suicide, Nidra? Surely there’s a time-delay option.”
“There is, but I’m not sure I’d be able to get to my ship in time. Besides, I don’t know what you’d do with me gone. If you can paralyse Lenka’s suit, you can probably work your way into the charge and disarm it.”
“You would kill Lenka at the same time.”
“Not if you let her go. And if you don’t let her go, this has to be a kinder way out than being sucked into you.” I allowed my thumb to rub back and forth over the trigger, only a twitch away from activating it. There
was an unsettling temptation to just do it. The light would be quick and painless, negating the past and future in a single cleansing flash.
In that moment I wanted it.
WHAT WOULD YOU have done, Captain?
Her mistake?
That’s easy. The thing she found, in the wreck of another ship, seemed dead to her. Dead and exhausted. Just a cluster of black cubes, lodged in the ship’s structure like the remnant of an infection. But it had not spread; it had not destroyed the wreck or achieved total transformation into a larger mass. She thought it was dead. She had no reason to think otherwise.
Can we blame her for that?
Not me.
Not you.
But the machinery was only dormant. When her ship was underway, while she slept, the black cubes began to show signs of life. They swelled, testing the limits of her containment measures. Her ship woke her up, asking what it should do. Her ship was almost a living thing in its own right. It was worried for her, worried for itself.
She had no answer.
She tried to strengthen the fields and layer the alien machinery in more armour. None of that worked. The forms broke through, began to eat her ship—making more cubes. She put more energy into her containment. What else could she do?”
Throw them overboard, you wonder?
Well, yes. She considered something like that. But that would only be passing the problem on to some other traveller. The responsibility was hers alone. She felt quite strongly about that.
Still, the machinery was definitely damaged. She was sure of that. Otherwise the transformation would have been fast and unstoppable. Instead, she had achieved a sort of stalemate.
What next?
Suicide, perhaps—dive into a star. But the data offered no guarantees that this would be enough to destroy the machinery. It might make it stronger!
Not a chance she could take.
Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds Page 78