House of Suns

  ‘Will she know I have seen her now?’

  ‘She knows everything. There are cameras throughout the house, watching every door, every corridor. They feed back into her mind. It’s not so that she can keep an eye on us.’

  ‘The ghosts,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Your mother watches for the slightest changes in light and shade. When she becomes agitated, it’s generally because she thinks she’s seen something.’

  ‘She saw something just now.’

  ‘There are no ghosts, Abigail. They’re all in her mind. You must remember that.’

  ‘I’m not silly.’ But then, I wondered, why did the staff like some parts of the house more than others? Why were there quiet, still rooms where no one ever liked to stay longer than they had to? If not because of ghosts, was it because my mother’s disturbed imagination was seeping out through those cameras, like a silent, invisible nerve gas?

  ‘I’ve seen enough,’ I said.

  ‘If I could speak to that little boy—’

  ‘It’s not his fault. He only told me what I had to know eventually.’

  Madame Kleinfelter nodded kindly and drew the metal shutters on my mother. I wondered at the awesome relief she must now feel; how long she had been dreading this encounter, the weight of it pressing down on her like an iron spike, through all the decades since I had been born ...

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  We had company from the moment we entered the Belladonna system. A ship arrowed in and tracked us, bristling with nervous potency. It was Adonis Blue, the warty green toad of a ship belonging to a shatterling named Betony. From the moment he intercepted us he had been excessively cautious, probing me with his deep-penetration sensors and insisting on several extra layers of authentication before he was ready to concede that I was not necessarily hostile.

  ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Campion,’ Betony’s imago said, ‘but we had to play things safe.’ He studied me with deep-penetration eyes, as if there might be a vital, betraying clue in the composure of my face. ‘It is you,’ he said, nodding slowly. ‘You made it out after all. The other ship - that would be Purslane, wouldn’t it? Silver Wings of Morning. You’re like two pennies that keep turning up at the same time.’ Before I could find malice in his remark, he added, ‘Today I couldn’t be happier to see you.’

  ‘We’re both alive. But it’s better than that. We’re carrying five other survivors: Aconite, Mezereon, Lucerne, Melilot and Valerian. They’re all still in abeyance, but otherwise safe and sound.’

  ‘Seven of you?’ Betony almost laughed with delight. ‘That’s wonderful news - it’s been so long since anyone else showed up that we’d all but stopped hoping. Do you have news about anyone else?’

  ‘I can’t say for certain, but from what I saw of the reunion system, it isn’t likely.’ All of a sudden I felt a rush of emotion. Betony had never been one of my favourites amongst the other shatterlings. More than once I had seen him as an understudy to Fescue, plotting and manipulating for influence within the Line. But if I had been wrong about Fescue, then it was entirely possible that I was wrong about Betony. All the old grievances and suspicions felt like baggage I could ill afford to carry. ‘It’s good to see you, Betony!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’m almost too scared to ask how many others are with you.’

  ‘There are forty-five of us. You seven take the total to fifty-two. There may be some more out there, still on their way, but I’m not optimistic.’

  ‘Fifty-two,’ I said, numbed in a way I had not been anticipating. I had considered worse scenarios than this, up to and including the possibility that there might only be the seven of us. But in my heart I had clung to the hope that there might be more than a hundred.

  ‘I know,’ Betony said, acknowledging my thoughts as if he had read my mind. ‘It’s not many. But we have to count ourselves lucky that anyone got out at all. And it is more than fifty, which means we have a valid quorum. We wouldn’t have let that stop us if a decision needed to be taken, but it’s good to know we can still do things by the book.’

  Abigail had never specified what would happen if there were fewer than fifty Line members in total: she must have considered that state of affairs so unlikely as to require no specific provisions, any more than she had told us what we should do if the universe began to collapse, or the Priors returned from the dead to reclaim the galaxy.

  But here we were, with just two members over the allowed minimum. I could see a wild relief in Betony, who had always been one for cleaving to Abigail’s hallowed commandments.

  ‘You’ll meet the others in due course,’ he said. ‘They’re all on Neume, apart from those of us seconded to patrol duties. Any ship entering this system is regarded with extreme suspicion - I regret to say that we’ve already had to destroy three incoming vehicles that could not prove themselves to be friendly. They all turned out to be exploratory probes from local nascents, but you can understand our nervousness.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone will have followed us,’ I said. ‘We had pursuers, but we shook them off. Betony - there’s something else you need to know. We’re carrying prisoners. Aconite and the others managed to capture them around the time that Fescue died.’

  ‘Yes, we heard about Fescue. It was terrible news. But he died well, didn’t he? A credit to the Line, right to the end.’ He nodded and was silent for a few moments, lost in a reverie as if this was the first time he had thought to dwell on the dead man. Then: ‘Tell me about the prisoners.’

  ‘There are four of them. We only know the name of one: he’s Grilse, a Marcellin shatterling.’ Anticipating his reaction, I said, ‘I know - we’ve never had problems with Marcellin Line before. Maybe Grilse was acting alone. He was supposedly lost to attrition ten or eleven of their circuits ago.’

  ‘Have you interrogated him?’

  ‘Aconite and Mezereon got what they could out of him, but didn’t want to kill him. They reckoned it was best to wait until we landed on Neume before pushing him harder.’

  ‘They did the right thing. If these prisoners are our only link to the ambushers, we must treat them as if they were the most precious things in the universe. In our case they may well be. But there’ll be no landings, I’m sorry to say.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Local custom. The troves were a bit out of date: by the time we arrived, there was a civilisation on Neume again.’

  ‘And the locals don’t want us to land?’

  ‘Oh, they wouldn’t mind. They’ve nothing against the Lines or our ships. We’ve been made more than welcome, as a matter of fact. The complicating factor is the Fracto-Coagulation, also known as the Spirit of the Air.’

  ‘The posthuman intelligence?’ I asked, remembering the summary the trove had provided when we had first learned the identity of the Belladonna fallback.

  Betony looked pleased. ‘You’ve done your homework. The Spirit’s been here for millions of years—longer than any tenant civilisation. The locals are very protective of it - as well they might be, given that it’s about the only reason anyone ever visits. They study it and worship it and sometimes you can’t tell the difference. But what they’re very clear on is that they don’t want anyone or anything upsetting it - and the intrusion of fifty-kilometre-long starships into its atmosphere very much falls into that category.’

  ‘Then we’ll whisk down, I suppose.’

  ‘No vacuum towers, Campion. You’ll have to come down in shuttles, I’m afraid - hope that won’t cramp your style too much.’

  ‘We’ll manage.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it. Is Purslane awake as well?’

  ‘She’ll be coming around about now. In any case, Silver Wings is programmed to follow Dalliance unless I do something really stupid.’

  ‘Follow me in, then, and we’ll find you somewhere to park your ships. I can’t promise much of a welcoming party - the collective mood’s taken a bit of battering lately. But we’ll do our best.’

  ‘I’m sure you will,’ I said. r />
  Betony’s green toad of a ship spun around and kicked spacetime in my face.

  ‘You’re sure it’s him, and not a trick by the ambushers?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, with supreme patience, for she had asked me this five or six times since her emergence from the cryophagus, each time listening to my reply and deeming it sufficient. ‘If it isn’t Betony, someone’s broken so deeply into Gentian secrets that we may as well give up now.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That sounds reasonable.’

  Purslane still had a sleepy look about her, a stiffness in her movements and a lack of focus in her eyes. She had whisked to Dalliance as soon as the casket released her. After a little while, her eyes became sharper and her mental gears found their normal mesh. As the fogginess cleared I told her what I had gathered from Betony.

  ‘I need to see Hesperus,’ she said suddenly. ‘I want to know if the lights are still on.’

  The lights were still on, but I could not swear that they were not dimmer and slower than before we had gone into abeyance. I held my tongue, not wanting to say so in Purslane’s presence. Behind the fretted stained-glass windows of his skull, they orbited like the planets and moons of a clockwork orrery that had nearly run down to stillness.

  ‘There’s still something there,’ I said, trying to strike a balance between optimism and pragmatism. ‘It may not be much, but—’

  ‘Don’t try to gee me up, Campion - I know he’s worse than he was before. But he’s still there. Whatever made that mark on the glass, it’s still inside him.’

  I had neglected to ask Betony whether the surviving shatterlings had brought any guests with them, and of those guests whether any were Machine People. All of a sudden it did not seem very likely.

  ‘We’ll get help for him on Neume. There’s a culture down there. They may know things we don’t. They’ve been studying a machine-based posthuman intelligence—’

  ‘That’s like saying “that man studies water lilies, so he can set my broken leg”.’

  ‘I’m just saying we’re not out of avenues to explore.’

  After a silence she said, ‘Have you seen Neume yet?’

  ‘Betony’s guiding us into orbit. I thought I’d wait until you were awake before taking a closer look.’

  ‘We’re not landing?’

  ‘There are issues. Best not to get on the wrong side of the locals, if we can help it.’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting locals.’

  ‘There was always an outside chance. From what Betony says, there won’t be any problems, provided we play nice.’ I offered her a hand. ‘Shall we adjourn to the bridge?’

  Some of Purslane’s warmth had returned by the time we whisked up-ship and stood before the displayer, our arms around each other and Purslane’s head lolling against my shoulder, as if she was only a yawn away from falling asleep again. I was glad that I had waited until now. Dalliance could have provided me with a magnified image of the world hours ago, but I had preferred to delay until we were only seconds out, decelerating hard in preparation for insertion into a polar orbit. When the displayer activated, we were passing through the planet’s equatorial plane, the world growing visibly larger by the second. Betony’s ship was a green dot in the centre of a blurred circle several thousand kilometres ahead of us.

  Neume was a dry world, about as far from the Centaurs’ panthalassic as it was possible to get. Ice gripped the planet at the poles, but the rest of it was as arid and silver-grey as pumice. The daylight face shone back at us, but it was the reflection of sunlight on crystal dunes, promising only the parched aridity of a desert. And yet the presence of an atmosphere was evident even now, a quill-thin halo drawn around the edge of the planet. There were even clouds in the atmosphere - wispy, attenuated things, like the ghosts of real clouds - but they were real enough.

  ‘Can we live down there?’ Purslane asked.

  ‘People already do, according to Betony.’

  ‘There’s oxygen. Scapers must have been here. But I don’t see any organisms, no vegetation or animal life.’

  ‘Perhaps the last tenants changed the atmosphere, and there’s still enough air in the system even though it isn’t being replenished.’

  Purslane lifted her head from my shoulder - she was growing more wakeful by the minute. ‘What’s that line across the equator? A ring system?’

  ‘Not rings,’ I said. ‘Some kind of orbital structure, I think.’

  ‘Looks ruined,’ Purslane said as the angle changed and the line became a battered, jagged-edged band thrown around the planet. It was obvious now that the band had been a single structure, circuits ago. At one time there would have been perhaps a dozen elevators connecting the planet’s equator to space, radiating out from Neume like spokes until they met the encircling band, ten or eleven thousand kilometres above the ground. Though none of the elevators now reached the surface, some of them still pushed down towards the atmosphere, or extended further out into space. The broken spokes were barnacled and furred, like the whiskery growth of an ice crystal. They had either succumbed to some corrupting rot, or had been built on by another tenant civilisation.

  ‘Hesperus knew this place,’ Purslane said.

  ‘What?’

  Her hand tightened around mine. ‘Don’t you see it?’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘His design - the cartwheel. We’re looking at it. It’s a picture of Neume, from space.’

  In a blinding instant I knew that she was right, but I could still not understand what it meant. ‘Why Neume?’ I asked.

  ‘Because he knew we were coming here. Because he knew something of this world, deep in his memory. Because he only had time and energy to send us one message before he went into deep shutdown.’

  ‘I still don’t get it. Why send us a picture of Neume? We already knew we were coming here.’

  ‘So it’s not just a picture. It’s something else - a message. It’s telling us what he wanted us to do.’

  We left our ships in polar orbit. Even without trying I recognised some of the others: Yellow Jester, Midnight Queen, Paper Courtesan, Steel Breeze ... each ship guaranteed the survival of a specific shatterling. My heart gladdened when I saw Cyphel’s Fire Witch. I really wanted her to be amongst the living.

  We all shared a shuttle down to the surface. By then Aconite and Mezereon had returned from abeyance, and the three other Gentian shatterlings would be brought back to life once we were on Neume. The shuttle also contained the four stasis-bound prisoners, stowed in an aft compartment. Purslane had decided against moving Hesperus for the time being, in case we did more harm than good. We followed Betony’s shuttle into the blue skies of Neume. His was a chrome teardrop, tapering at the rear to an almost impossibly fine spike.

  Our shuttle, which belonged to Purslane, was shaped like a deck of cards with a slanting front, perfect for aerial sightseeing. An observation lounge faced the sloping window, raked at an angle that offered an unobstructed view of the ground. Tables and chairs were set around, but none of us was much interested in sitting. We leaned against the polished wood railing before the window, craning for a first glimpse of the tenant civilisation.

  ‘I’d better fill you in,’ said Betony’s imago, beaming in from the teardrop. He wore a long green gown, purple trousers and heavy black boots striped up the sides with platinum fluting. ‘Neume’s an old world and it’s seen a lot of history - we’re only four thousand years from the Old Place. Settlers were here barely twenty-two kilo-years into the spacefaring era. Do you remember the Commonwealth of the Radiant Expansion?’

  Purslane nodded. ‘Dimly.’

  ‘I’ve a feeling I should,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you were never much one for ancient history - even the bits you lived through,’ Betony said. Beyond the window, an endless sea of silvery dunes reached to a pale horizon, still curved by altitude. ‘But it’s no crime. I had to bone up on the Commonwealth myself. Didn’t help that it was over and done by the thirtieth millennium and
never extended beyond more than fifty or sixty settled systems, depending on which troves you believe. From what we can gather, no one was here before that - they found a handful of Prior artefacts in the comet cloud, but that was as far as it went.’

  ‘Did the Commonwealth scape?’ Purslane asked. ‘I was thinking of the atmosphere.’

  ‘Had a go, but the ecosystem collapsed before the work was completed. You have to skip forward another thirty thousand before anyone else arrived on Neume, by which time the planet had reset itself. The Bright Efflorescence were the next tenants - they made a decent fist of it. Lasted forty-five thousand and managed to scape not just Neume but four or five other planet-class bodies in the system. Neume’s the only one that survived, though - more’s the pity. If they hadn’t got into a micro-war with the Red Star Imperium they might have achieved something.’

  ‘And after the Bright Efflorescence?’ I asked.

  ‘Skip another quarter of a million years and in comes the High Benevolence.’