House of Suns

  We went to see the doctor.

  The tank was as dark as ever, but now there was something bulging against the glass from within, revealed in flattened pale islands interrupted by rivers and inlets of random shadow. I looked at it for a few numb moments, trying to work out how that pale, doughy mass could have been introduced into the tank without Doctor Meninx becoming aware of it. Then I made out the flattened, ruptured oval of something that had once been an eye, and it dawned on me, slowly and then with increasing conviction, that the pale mass was Doctor Meninx, and that he had bloated to at least twice his previous volume, until he could expand no more.

  I scrambled up the ladder to the top of the tank. I folded back the hinged section of walkway and began to twist the circular hatchway. I spun it free and began to lever it back, but I had only opened it a crack when I was assaulted by a noxious, vinegary stench.

  I slammed the hatch back down.

  ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘I cannot say,’ Hesperus replied.

  My hands trembling, I lowered myself down the side of the tank, back onto the safety of the floor. I had never really liked Doctor Meninx, and I had liked him less and less as his true prejudices bubbled to the surface. But he had been a fellow starfarer, a being who had travelled far, swum in oceans of memory and experience, and now all that memory and experience were gone.

  The anger hit me with the cold force of a supernova shockwave.

  ‘What do you mean, you cannot say? You were fucking awake, Hesperus. You were the only one he had anything to fear from. The only one he thought might want to kill him. And now he’s dead.’

  Hesperus stood at the entrance to the chamber, his arms at his sides, his head lowered slightly, like a schoolboy summoned for punishment.

  ‘I understand your reaction, Purslane, but as I have already explained to Campion, this was not my doing.’

  ‘Why didn’t you try to help him?’ Campion asked.

  ‘I did, despite your request that I keep away from him. When I detected signs that Doctor Meninx’s tank chemistry was amiss - signs that I stress were by no means compellingly obvious - I attempted to adjust the equipment in such a way as to remedy the perceived imbalance. I soon discovered that the equipment was not amenable to outside interference.’

  I was still not ready to let go of my suspicion, but I wanted to hear the rest of his defence. ‘And?’

  ‘I discovered that by merely tampering with the equipment I had raised Doctor Meninx from his drug-induced slumber. Upon his return to partial consciousness, I attempted to explain the nature of his predicament. Unfortunately, Doctor Meninx refused to believe that my intentions were anything other than improper. He urged me to desist tampering with his tank at the earliest opportunity.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Of course not: I persisted, despite Doctor Meninx’s far from lucid protestations. Yet as I attempted assist him, the doctor succeeded in activating certain devices built into his tank, the purpose of which was deter outside interference. These countermeasures, though posing no serious threat to my own existence, nonetheless made it prohibitively difficult for me to access the very mechanisms I sought to examine and adjust. With regret, I was forced to abandon my efforts. I could not save the doctor, but merely witness his inevitable decline. It was at this point that I attempted to raise you from abeyance, without success.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I made a number of subsequent attempts both to reason with the doctor and to repair the chemical imbalance, but on all such occasions I was forced to retreat. Eventually there came a day when the doctor appeared insensate, and shortly afterwards I concluded that he was dead. Other than monitoring the integrity of the tank, in case it should rupture and spill the contents into your ship, I have had nothing more to do with the personage.’

  ‘Open and shut, in other words,’ Campion said.

  ‘I can only speak the truth,’ Hesperus replied.

  He was with us when we ran the Belladonna algorithm. We were looking at a portion of the Milky Way, writ large on Campion’s displayer. The view had already zoomed in on Dalliance’s position, with only a thousand lights or so visible in any direction - about the thickness of the disc itself. The red line that marked Dalliance’s future course was arrowing out towards the extremities of the galaxy. A cone projected ahead of the ship, indicating the algorithm’s search volume.

  ‘It requires us to search in the direction of the galactic anti-centre,’ I said. ‘We look along a radial line extending away from the core that passes through the position of the reunion system. As it happens, that’s pretty close to our present heading.’

  ‘The volume will encompass the system you were already approaching,’ said Hesperus. ‘Will that not lead to an ambiguity?’

  ‘Belladonna explicitly instructs us to ignore the reunion system, and any suitable systems lying closer to the galactic centre,’ I said. ‘It obliges us to look beyond, until we find a star of the right spectral type and with the right formation of planets. It must lie at least fifty years from the designated reunion world to give us a chance of getting there without being tracked - any closer and we could be followed too easily. There has to be a rocky world in a circular orbit at a suitable distance from the star.’

  ‘The world must be life-supporting?’

  ‘Not necessarily, but it shouldn’t be so inhospitable that it could never be scaped. We could easily spend several thousand years in the vicinity of the fallback. That’s long enough to modify a climate, even to shift a borderline case to true habitability.’

  ‘And if the world is already occupied?’

  ‘Then we’ll be guests of whoever owns the place. Most civilisations know enough about the Lines not to turn them down in their hour of need.’

  ‘And if they should turn you down?’

  ‘It’s not something you do twice.’

  After a moment Campion said, ‘Looks like we have a candidate.’

  The image zoomed in again, dizzyingly, on a solitary yellow star. It was ninety lights beyond the reunion system - practically on its doorstep in galactic terms, but safely beyond the proscribed margin of fifty lights. Provided we did not head there directly, but went off in a false direction before steering back towards it once we were out of detection range, we would be able to reach the system without being followed.

  I digested the trove data scrolling down next to the star. The summary was in all likelihood no more than the last layer of virgin ice on a mountain of data known to Gentian Line. Given the perceptual bottlenecks of the human central nervous system, there might be more ‘known’ about this world than could ever be absorbed in a normal lifetime.

  ‘Neume,’ said Campion, stroking his chin. ‘Rings a bell - although I suppose there are thousands of Neumes out there.’

  ‘No—I’m getting it as well, and I think the memory’s specific to this sector. One of us must have been there. Not you or I, or it would come through stronger. It must have been quite a few circuits ago - enough for the place to have changed a bit.’

  According to the trove, the planet had seen many native civilisations. No one was listed as living there now, but that was no guarantee that we would find the world unoccupied. The trove’s last update on the matter was twelve kilo-years stale.

  ‘The world touches a chord of familiarity with me as well,’ Hesperus said.

  ‘You’ve been to Neume?’ I asked.

  ‘Not been, I think. Nothing in my bones tells me I have walked that soil. But I may have intended to go there, as part of my wider explorations.’

  ‘There’s something on Neume called the Spirit of the Air,’ Campion said, reading a few lines further down the summary. ‘Some kind of posthuman machine intelligence, I think, although it’s all a bit vague. Any chance you were interested in that?’

  ‘You mean as one machine to another?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  Campion was still suspicious of Hesperus, even though we had agreed to
give him the benefit of the doubt where Doctor Meninx was concerned.

  ‘It is certainly possible. It is also possible that I am quite mistaken about Neume. As you say, there may be other worlds with that name.’

  ‘I guess you’ll know when we get there,’ I said.

  ‘One can but hope,’ Hesperus said. ‘Of course, there is the small matter of the ambush to deal with first. I wonder if I might be of assistance in that regard?’

  ‘We can’t trust him,’ Campion said, lying against me. ‘Even if we wanted to trust him, it’d be the wrong thing to do.’

  ‘He’s offered to help us. I’ve told him I’ll let him pick a ship from my cargo bay, something he can use.’

  ‘Could be a ruse.’

  ‘You mean, he’s going to take the ship and never come back?’

  ‘It’s a distinct possibility.’

  ‘Yes, and so is the possibility that he’s telling us the truth.’ I propped myself up on one elbow. ‘So what if he does leave us? We’ll have lost a guest and a ship I probably don’t even remember acquiring. Hardly the worst thing we’re going to have to deal with.’

  ‘I’ll remind you of that when he turns his guns on us.’

  ‘He’s a rational sentient, Campion - not a vengeance-crazed psychopath.’ I ran a finger though the fine hair of his chest, across his belly and down to his sleeping penis. We had been lying together in a warm post-coital haze, until I made the mistake of starting a conversation. ‘The mad one was Doctor Meninx. Hesperus just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

  ‘So he says.’

  ‘Do you actually believe he murdered Meninx?’

  Campion struggled with his reply. ‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘I think the doctor just took one short cut too many with his equipment. But I have to act as if I’m taking the matter seriously. I can’t appear negligent where the death of a guest is concerned.’

  ‘Even when the other guest has volunteered to put his life on the line to help us?’

  ‘Don’t make this any harder than it already is. I’m just saying, Hesperus has some ground to make up. He has to earn my trust again. Earn our trust.’

  I caressed him until he began to show faint signs of life. ‘He’s earned mine already. You’re the one who needs to catch up, Campion.’

  Hesperus ran a golden hand along the golden flank of the little spacecraft he had found tucked in one corner of the enormous room. It was scarcely larger than a whale, more a trinket than a ship.

  ‘It’s called Vespertine,’ I said. ‘That’s about all I remember. I think someone may have given it to me as a gift. I can’t recall the last time I had to use a shuttle to move between vessels, rather than just whisking over. Been a while since I dealt with an entry-level civilisation.’

  ‘This is more than a shuttle,’ Hesperus said, still stroking the little ship’s skin.

  ‘What are we dealing with, then?’

  ‘A true interstellar vehicle, Purslane. I believe that the lateral bulge conceals part of a small parametric engine, or something employing similar principles.’

  I shrugged. ‘Doesn’t change much. There are other interstellar ships in here. I keep them for trade.’

  We were in Silver Wings’ main storage/cargo bay, in the aft third of my ship. The bay was a rectangular pressurised space eight kilometres long, three across and nearly two in height. We had entered through the cliff-like edifice of the forward wall and followed a series of suspended walkways through the chamber, winding between the many ships and ship-sized artefacts that formed my private collection. They loomed huge, most of them cloaked in shadow or darkness except for the odd clean or ragged edge, a smooth or imbricated surface, limned by the cold blue radiance of the distant ceiling-mounted spotlights.

  Lately I spent as little time as possible in the main bay. The clutter of the place, the disordered collection of ships and artefacts, was an uncomfortable reminder of the disorder in my head. My skull was a pressure cooker, crammed with too much history. They both needed sorting out, but the longer I put off either task, the less enthusiasm I had.

  Campion had always been less sentimental than me. He could ditch ancient treasure, or submit to memory consolidation, without a moment’s hesitation. He moved through life with less baggage, less to weigh him down, less to anchor him to his own history. I had always admired him for that willingness to discard his own past, while knowing it was one of the things that made us distinct, a bridge I could never cross if I wished to remain Purslane.

  And I did, of course.

  Sometimes I thought of Abigail making clay dolls of us, the way a girl might pass a rainy afternoon, with no thought for what would become of those dolls when she sent them into the world. How trivial it must have been for her to adjust the parameters of her personality before pouring a measure of it into each of her shatterlings. Did it cross her mind, even for an instant, that there might be less than joyous consequences? That on some unthinkably distant day one of her shatterlings would be standing in a vast room halfway across the galaxy, weighed down with the melancholic sense of being an unwilling curator in some dusty, little-visited museum of her own existence?

  Hesperus was looking at me, waiting for me to continue.

  ‘Shatterlings tend to be hoarders, as you may have noticed. I’ve never had much use for half the stuff in here, but I can’t bring myself to get rid of it. I’d be too worried about throwing away something really vital, without realising it.’

  ‘I quite understand. But this ship may yet have possibilities. I should like permission to go aboard, if it will not inconvenience you.’

  Vespertine floated in a weightless cradle just beyond the gravity bubble encompassing the walkway. Hesperus had to lean over the railing to reach its skin. It was ridged with a Byzantine design, mazes and chevrons and interlocked flower-like forms, vanishing down to a fractal haze of microscopic detail that made the edges appear out of focus. I presumed the design served some arcane field-modifying effect, much as the roughened skin of a shark assisted it in swimming.

  ‘Is there something in particular about this ship that interests you?’

  ‘I should like to see if it is functional, and whether it will accept me as a pilot.’

  ‘I don’t blame you for wanting to leave us, Hesperus.’

  ‘Not my intention. I am considering how I may be of practical assistance during the forthcoming encounter.’

  ‘But this is just a tiny little minnow.’

  ‘Size may well be the issue here, but not in the sense you are implying. A ship as small as this one would be limited in its agility not by the power output of its engine, but by the strength of its dampening field. But I am not human. Unbalanced forces that would reduce you to red jelly - I am sorry to be so graphic, but it is necessary to make my point - would register with me only as a mild impediment to free movement.’

  ‘Being able to move fast isn’t going to protect you from everything that might be hiding in that cloud.’

  ‘My mission must have been evaluated as a high-risk enterprise from the moment I left Machine Space. I would have gone into it knowing that there would be moments of crisis and uncertainty. In that respect, nothing has changed.’

  ‘Did Campion show you the structures?’

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  As she had refined her observations of the reunion system, Silver Wings had detected bright objects embedded in the cloud. They were huge glowing structures of irregular shape, branching into jagged fingers like frozen lightning bolts. They were shrouded in dust now, difficult to examine, but we would see them up close when we slammed through the cloud.

  We had no idea what they were - deep trove searches were continuing - but their presence did nothing to lighten our mood.

  ‘They don’t worry you?’

  ‘They are certainly puzzling. I may even know what they are, on a level of memory I cannot presently access. I also have every confidence that I can steer around them without coming to harm
.’

  Despite everything that had happened, the weight of knowledge bearing down on me, his bravery stirred me. ‘What I said earlier still applies. If you want to leave, you can take any of these ships. I won’t hold it against you, and neither will Campion.’

  ‘I am still in your debt. I have no intention of leaving until that is settled. Now, may I be permitted to examine the ship? If I am to make the best use of it, I may wish to modify some of her control systems. I know there is still time, but the sooner I start the better.’

  ‘Campion and I will be going into abeyance shortly. We’ll come out when we’re closer, about to begin slowdown.’

  I told Silver Wings to release the security binding on the golden ship, allowing Hesperus to board it. Part of the handrail vanished and a portion of the flooring bulged outwards to connect with a baroque doorway that had just formed in the side of the ship. Soft blue light emanated from the interior, highlighting the chromed flanges on the sides of Hesperus’s face. He stepped through the blue-lit doorway, one gold machine entering another. After a moment the doorway rendered itself impassable - it was as if a pane had frosted over with gold leaf - and then vanished back into the baroque patterning of the hull, leaving no trace of its former existence. The railing remade itself. A breeze, caused by a shift in the miniature weather system that inhabited this bay, flicked a hair across my brow. I had not been there for so long that my entrance had disturbed the equilibrium of the captured atmosphere.

  There are times when you go into abeyance with the weight of the world on your shoulders, and come out with all your problems suddenly diminished - still there, still meriting your attention, but no longer having the looming stature that they did before.

  This was not one of those times. I came out of the casket with the same dread feeling that I had had going in.

  We braked hard and braked sudden, pushing our engines to the limit. Until the moment when we began slowdown and dug claws into spacetime like cats sliding down a wall, there would have been little or no warning of our imminent arrival.