The hard notch of a frown ate into her brow. ‘Leave him here?’
‘The choice’ll be his. If he wants, I’ll take him all the way back to the reunion world.’
‘He won’t like it.’
‘He doesn’t like anything - haven’t you noticed?’
A thin figure was stalking across the sand from the direction of the bathing machine. As the walker neared, climbing the crumbling steps up to the road, it revealed itself to be a paper cut-out of a harlequin, inked in watery diamonds. The two-dimensional figure - which resisted the breeze just as effectively as Mister Nebuly’s hanging sheet - was a humanoid avatar of Doctor Meninx. At the same time as the avatar approached, Nebuly left the red-suited centaurs and started trotting back in our direction. He arrived first, the avatar still a good hundred metres away.
‘Might I assume that you’ve reached a decision, honoured shatterling?’ he asked.
‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to turn you down,’ I said. ‘I’m not saying your terms aren’t generous, but I have to be realistic. I think I can get a better deal for my trove somewhere else.’
‘If you are thinking of Ateshga, I’d caution against it. He has a very bad reputation.’
I scratched sand from my eyes. ‘Ateshga - who’s he?’
‘Merely a warning, shatterling - it’s up to you whether you heed it.’ He brushed his hands against the breast of his pinstripe suit. ‘Well, I am sorry we could not close a deal, but it won’t stop us parting as friends. We are very happy that you visited our world, and I trust your stay here has been rewarding.’
‘It has,’ Purslane said. ‘You’ve been excellent hosts, Mister Nebuly; I’ll be sure to put in a good word for you with the rest of the Line.’
‘That is very kind of you.’ He turned around to greet the approaching avatar, bowing slightly from the point where his human torso joined his horse body. ‘You finished your swim very quickly, Doctor: I trust all was satisfactory?’
‘No,’ the avatar said in his high-pitched, piping voice. ‘The swim was . very far from satisfactory, which is why I aborted it at the earliest opportunity. There were things in the water - dark, moving things that my sonar could not easily resolve - and the temperature and salinity were not at all to my tastes.’ The paper face bent in my direction. ‘I was given to understand that you had communicated my needs to the relevant authorities, Campion.’
I shifted on my seat. I had told the Centaurs what the doctor needed, and I had no doubt that they had done their best to meet his requirements. Nothing was ever good enough for Doctor Meninx, though; no effort ever sufficient.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I must have mixed up the figures. All my fault, I’m afraid.’
‘I shall lay the blame where I choose to lay it,’ the avatar said. ‘And I was so looking forward to my swim. But what’s done is done; shortly I shall take my leave of this dreary world and continue my odyssey to the Vigilance. Perhaps they will know the fit way to treat a guest.’
‘I’m sure Mister Nebuly did his best,’ I said.
‘Yes, he probably did,’ the avatar said, as if our host was not present.
The moment, the one I had been dreading since Mister Nebuly had delivered his verdict on my trove, was now upon me. I could postpone it no longer, though at that instant there was nothing I would rather have done than walk into the sea and swim all the way to that twinkling horizon, where, depending on the effectiveness of its setting, the impasse would have dissuaded, rebuffed, stunned, wounded or simply annihilated me.
‘Doctor Meninx,’ I said, after drawing a deep, invigorating breath, ‘there’s something we need to discuss.’
CHAPTER TWO
It would be a mistake to say that Campion was lazy, laziness being a trait that Abigail went out of her way to scrub from our personalities. But Campion was certainly a masterful prevaricator. He did not just put things off until tomorrow; he put them off for tens of kilo-years, until his delays and evasions consumed significant chunks of an entire circuit. His motto might have been Why do today what you can still do in a quarter of a million years?
He had got away with it for thirty-one circuits, too. But now this business with Doctor Meninx was going to make up for that glorious streak of good luck. Campion joked about censure and excommunication, as if to immunise himself from those outcomes. But the Line’s tolerance of his antics had been wearing perilously thin for several circuits, which is why he had been saddled with Doctor Meninx in the first place. He should have discharged that obligation as urgently as possible, instead of dilly-dallying from star to star with the doctor still aboard.
It was a short hop from the Centaurs’ system to Nelumbium - barely ninety years of flight by planetary time - but it was still necessary to enter some form of abeyance. Campion preferred stasis; I - much to his incomprehension - preferred to be frozen and thawed. As soon as the cryophagus released me, I called up the information from Silver Wings’ sensors, and apart from a whisper of residual energies - which might mean only that a ship had passed through this system in recent centuries - there was no evidence at all of human habitation.
No Ateshga, no ships.
Once I had digested Silver Wings’ analysis, I whisked over to Dalliance, then up-ship to the bridge, where Campion and Doctor Meninx were already waiting for me. Campion was seated, reclining back in one of the couches, while the avatar stood close to him. They were both facing the enormous, illuminated wall of the displayer. Although I could not make out their words, the acoustics of the bridge were such that I could tell they were lost in quiet, slightly strained conversation, a petulant or defensive note rising every now and then.
I did not need to be told what they were talking about.
Most of the displayer was filled with a plan-view of the Milky Way, based on the trove’s knowledge of real conditions. The spirals were traced with wispy filaments of white and yellow, ochre and tan and dulling, fire-brick orange, with the individual stars too countless to separate, discernible only by their groupings into associations, streams and clusters. The only stars one saw as distinct entities were the very brightest: end-phase supergiants burning their way to supernova, or Tauri-phase youngsters, glaring out of that barred spiral in hot blues and venomous reds.
The main disc, excluding the outer band of the Monoceros Ring, was ninety thousand lights across. Settled worlds spread from the core to the outermost extremities of the spiral arms, but the highest density of human habitation was in the thick band of the Comfort Zone, the region where planets required the least adaptation to make them liveable. Provided it stayed within the Zone, a ship could circumnavigate the galaxy in two hundred kilo-years and still have time to stop off at a hundred systems en route. That was a circuit, the two-hundred-kilo-year interval between Gentian reunions.
The last reunion world had been a planet on the coreward extremity of the Norma Spiral Arm. Since then we had travelled clockwise, looping out to cross the Local Spur, passing within a thousand lights of the Old Place, then diving back through the Sagittarius, Scutum-Crux and Perseus Arms, before returning to the other side of the Scutum-Crux Arm. A wavery red line traced our progress. The Centaurs’ panthalassic had been in Scutum-Crux, and the distance we had travelled since then was barely a scratch against the scale of the spiral, not even enough to take us out of the arm. Marked in dashed red was the distance we still had to travel to make it to the reunion; it was less than a thousand lights in the direction of the Sagittarius Arm.
In circuit terms, we were nearly home. Yet as far as our punctuality was concerned, it may as well have been ten thousand lights, or ninety thousand.
We were going to be late, very late, and that was very much not the done thing.
‘Ah, here comes the lovely Purslane,’ said Doctor Meninx, his voice rising to a note of shrill indignation. ‘She will lend a sympathetic ear to my complaints even if you choose not to, Campion. Is that not so, Purslane?’
‘I don’t know, Doctor Meninx. What ex
actly are you complaining about?’
‘Need I explain?’ the avatar said, raising a limp origami arm in the direction of the displayer. ‘Once again Campion has let me down! Not only did he fail to deliver me to the Vigilance, not only did he attempt to fob me off on those stinking, ill-mannered horse-people with their revolting bodily habits, not only did he stand by as I nearly drowned in their horrid, flotsam-infested bay, but now he has the temerity to tell me that I will not even return to the reunion in time to be entrusted to someone else’s better care!’
‘I didn’t say that,’ Campion replied, sounding like a man drained of argument. ‘All I said was that we might be just a tiny bit late.’
‘And this reunion of yours - they will delay starting it until you have arrived?’ The avatar’s tone was needling. ‘Is that what you are telling me?’
‘I can’t make any guarantees. If Ateshga’s here, and if he agrees to replace my ship, we might not be very late at all.’
I walked across the narrow tongue that connected the main part of the bridge to the circular platform where Campion and Doctor Meninx were waiting.
‘So where do you think he is?’
‘I don’t know, hiding or something,’ Campion said.
Doctor Meninx pounced. ‘Oh, yes - hiding- that well-known business model, embraced by profit-conscious traders the galaxy over.’
I smiled. ‘At least the view’s nice.’
Ateshga’s world - shown beneath the map of the galaxy - was an outrageous confection of a planet: a striped marshmallow giant with a necklace of sugary rings, combed and braided by the resonant forces of a dozen glazed and candied moons. We were crossing the ecliptic, so the rings were slowly tilting to a steeper angle, revealing more of their loveliness. There was no doubt that it was one of the most glorious worlds I had ever seen, and I had seen quite a few.
But we had not come here to gawp at a picturesque planet, even if it was a spectacular exemplar of the form.
‘Did you get anything I missed?’ Campion asked.
I kissed Campion, then took one of the unoccupied couches. ‘There were some hints of technological activity, but nothing you’d bet your life on. Maybe a ship came through with a noisy drive, or perhaps I’m just seeing some leakage from the private network of another Line. We don’t appear to have a functioning node in this system.’
‘I’ll make sure we leave one. It might be the kind of thing that will placate Fescue.’
‘I’m afraid it’ll take rather more than that.’
‘I notice it’s all right when he’s late.’
I pressed a finger to my brow, feeling a throbbing between my eyes. ‘Don’t start on about Fescue again.’
‘We all had to wait in abeyance until he deigned to arrive. How long was it? Seven, eight kilo-years easily. I didn’t see him getting censured.’
‘That’s because Fescue had been invited by the Rebirthers to witness a Kindling. He couldn’t leave until it was finished, as you well know. Your situation is very different.’
‘Go on, kick a man when he’s down.’
‘Perhaps I should entrust myself to Purslane instead,’ Doctor Meninx said. ‘That way I might at least get back to the reunion before it finishes.’
‘You know, that’s not such a bad idea. Why don’t both of you leave now, and I’ll catch up when I’m able?’
‘As if I’d ever do that,’ I said, shooting an apologetic glance at the avatar. ‘Sorry, Doctor Meninx, but I can’t abandon Campion here.’
‘There’ll be repercussions.’
‘And you’re still my guest,’ Campion said.
‘More’s the pity.’
‘Indeed. And wouldn’t it be a tragedy if something happened to you between now and the reunion? Something obscure and undocumented, like a sudden breakdown of tank chemistry? Can’t be too careful, you know: that apparatus already looks as if it belongs back in some museum of horrors from the Golden Hour. It’s just begging for something to go wrong with it.’
The paper figure’s face creased in anger. ‘Are you threatening me, shatterling?’
‘No, just indulging in a little wishful thinking.’
Things might have taken a turn for the worse at that point had Dalliance not chosen to interrupt with a report. Someone - something - was signalling our two ships. A vehicle had emerged from the atmosphere of the giant, near its lusciously banded equator: a vehicle that had been completely hidden until that moment, but which was now keen to announce its existence.
‘And to think you doubted me,’ Campion said.
The other vessel was reassuringly old-fashioned: a solid, reliable example of Eleventh Intercessionary shipbuilding. It was all severe angles and dark, lustrous facets, like a mountain-sized lump of coal chiselled into the shape of an arrowhead. It had continued to signal us since its emergence, sending a single repeating transmission in Tongue. There had been no need to respond; the message had simply instructed us to decelerate from our trans-ecliptic trajectory and await further instructions.
The vessel curved past the ring system without penetrating it and came to a dead stop in the local reference frame defined by Dalliance and Silver Wings of Morning. The three ships formed an approximate equilateral triangle, with only a thousand kilometres between their centres of mass. Campion’s ship was an Art Deco rhomboid; mine a headless chrome swan with wings curved and raised as if in courtship.
‘Now what?’ I asked.
‘We wait and see. Ateshga - whoever he is - probably hasn’t had much company lately. I don’t think he’s going to be particularly bothered about keeping us waiting a bit longer.’
I touched a finger against the side of my head. I had felt a shivery, someone-walking-over-my-grave sensation. ‘Silver Wings has just been scanned with deep-penetration sensors.’
‘Attack him now,’ shrilled Doctor Meninx. ‘Why are you waiting? Attack him immediately!’
‘Dalliance is requesting permission to realise an imago,’ Campion said.
‘Nothing ventured,’ I said.
A hooded figure resolved into existence before us, rendered with just enough translucence and artificial flicker to affirm that this was a projection, not a physical presence. The voice - slow and deep and sonorous - was modulated to sound as if it had passed through a primitive transmitting apparatus.
‘State your business here, Dalliance and Silver Wings of Morning.’ The figure spoke a variant of Tongue, the only thing approaching a universal language for star-travellers.
‘I’m looking for someone called Ateshga,’ Campion said, using Trans, the private language of the Commonality of Lines, trusting Dalliance to translate his outgoing message into Tongue. He could speak Tongue as well as I could, but preferred to let the ship do the hard work.
‘I ask again: what is your business here? Why have you arrived in this system?’
‘I need a new ship,’ Campion answered. ‘I was led to believe I might find one here.’
The figure hovering before us wore a hooded gown of dark-red material, patterned with fine chrome wires in the branching forms of ancient circuitry. His hands were clasped, but otherwise hidden under voluminous sleeves. Of his face, nothing was visible under that dark, sagging hood.
‘A ship?’ he asked, as if it was the last thing in the world Campion might have been looking for. ‘Why would you want a ship, traveller?’
‘Mine’s getting a bit worn out.’
I had the sense of something staring at me from under the hood, something with superhuman acumen.
‘Do you see many ships here, traveller?’
‘They’re not exactly leaping out at me, no.’
‘In which case it would appear that you have come to the wrong place, would it not?’
‘Except my trove says otherwise,’ Campion said. ‘Now, if you hadn’t popped out of that Jovian I might have put it down to faulty data, but your arrival is a coincidence too far. I am speaking to Ateshga, aren’t I?’
‘What would your trove
have to say about this Ateshga?’
‘Very little. His prices are said to be fair, and apparently he has a large assortment of used vessels. But if he sells ships, that’s really all I need to know.’
The sleeves fell back to reveal thin white wrists and even thinner white fingers, curiously jointed and tipped with obsidian nails. The hands reached up to throw back the hood. Ateshga’s face was a ghoulish mask: gauzy white skin papered over a hollow-cheeked skull. His eyes were set deep into shadowed sockets. His teeth were jagged chips of blood-red glass, pushed into his gums at irregular angles.
‘I might have some ships.’
Campion looked at me before answering. ‘Can we see them?’
‘Follow me. I will show you what is on offer.’
‘I do not trust this man,’ said Doctor Meninx. ‘I insist that we leave immediately.’
My thoughts flicked back to the warning Mister Nebuly had given us. It was like touching a raw nerve.
‘Campion,’ I said, ‘maybe we ought to think—’
Ateshga’s ship wheeled around and accelerated back towards the gas giant. Exotic particles twinkled into existence in its wake as tortured, addled spacetime relaxed back towards its normal tension. Stars and one edge of the ring system blurred as if seen through moiled water.
‘We’re going in,’ Campion said.
CHAPTER THREE
At the last possible instant, Ateshga’s ship threw an impasse around itself as armour against the atmosphere as it plunged into the cloud deck. Dalliance’s impassor was less effective and we experienced moderate buffeting as the aerodynamic forces increased. Purslane grimaced and muttered something about how we should have gone in her ship instead. Silver Wings was standing watch in orbit, monitoring our descent.
Ateshga took us one hundred kilometres into the clouds, disengaging his parametric engine and using sequenced field rippling to swim through the air. That was a trick Dalliance had not been capable of for about ten thousand years. I switched from pseudo- to real-thrust.
Above us, the sky had lightened by degrees to a pastel azure, streaked with horsetails of fine white cirrus. A couple of moons were visible as delicate crescents, but the shadowed rings were hidden. Below us, billowing ochre thunderheads elbowed their way through a mustard-coloured smog, rent here and there to reveal plunging vistas of cloud and chemistry, reaching down into dizzy, canyon-like depths hundreds of kilometres beneath us.