‘The instant I conjure this spell, Calidris will know of it,’ Relictus said. ‘I must be confident of success, for if I fail, I shall not get a second chance. Calidris will adapt his methods, and this one opportunity will slip through our fingers.’
‘Do what you must.’
Eventually he pronounced himself ready. The text of the spell occupied an entire page, as complicated and difficult as a piece of chamber music. Once he had begun to utter it, there would be no going back, and the tiniest mistake, the smallest imprecision, would render the entire spell ineffective.
‘I must be unbound,’ Relictus said. ‘If I do not have complete freedom of movement, the spell will be miscast.’
‘Keep that knife on his neck,’ I told Lanius, who was with me in the dungeon.
Relictus shook his head slowly. ‘The knife will impede me.’
‘I should trust you, when you could just as easily use your magic to escape this dungeon?’ I asked.
‘If I did, milady, my absence would still be the least of your worries. Count Mordax would triumph eventually, and that would be as bad for me as it would for you. You have little option but to trust me now.’
‘Take away the knife,’ I growled.
Relictus rubbed a finger across his throat, where the knife had nicked his skin and drawn a thin line of blood. I knew then that he would not betray us. He had already had time to utter a debilitating spell, and yet he had held his tongue.
He walked to the Ghost Soldier and undid its fastenings.
‘Why do you free it?’ I asked.
‘As an effective demonstration of the spell’s potency, milady. Otherwise you would see little difference.’
‘Are you sure it’s safe?’
‘Perfectly so. Can you not see how trusting it has become?’ He beckoned the Ghost Soldier to step forward, then raised an arm indicating that it should stop. ‘It understands nothing of what I say. It still thinks I mean it no harm. I think it even likes me, in a limited fashion. I have been far kinder to it than the captain who once ordered it into battle.’
‘Are you ready to cast the spell?’
He returned to his desk, pushed hair from his wild eyes and ran a finger down the lines of the spell, formulated in the cluttered symbolic language of magicians. His finger stopped once, moved back a line, and I saw hesitation in his face. Then he nodded and resumed his progress.
‘There is no reason to delay. I am as ready now as I shall ever be,’ Relictus declared.
‘Then do it.’
He closed his eyes once, reopened them after a moment, inhaled deeply and began speaking. The words meant nothing to me; the gestures indecipherable. But their effect on the Ghost Soldier was beyond argument. It began to jerk, the armour twitching. Relictus was so absorbed in the accurate recitation of the spell that I do not think he allowed himself to record its consequences. When he was halfway through the spell (I followed the progress of his finger as he moved from line to line) the armour toppled over, the Ghost Soldier thrashing on the dungeon floor like a man in the grip of palsy. Its movements became more frenzied. A noise began to issue from the armour, like the wind through a draughty door. The figure quickened its movements. The head thrashed from side to side. The arms and legs beat the ground, moving so rapidly that the eye struggled to keep up. Relictus continued with his recitation. Three-quarters of the way down, the Ghost Soldier’s paroxysm reached a moment of maximum violence - the armour thrashing, the sound a squeal of agony - and then it began to calm, its movements slowing, its strength ebbing. Before Relictus had reached the last line of his spell, the creature was still. The red smoke was no longer visible.
‘It is done,’ he said, mopping his brow with his sleeve and drawing a series of deep, relieved breaths. ‘I do not believe I made any error of recitation. Judging by the state of the Ghost Soldier, the formulation was correct.’
‘It seemed to feel pain,’ I said, distressed by the spectacle in a way I had not anticipated. ‘An agony beyond words.’
Relictus offered his hands to be bound again. ‘Did I ever say it wouldn’t?’
‘And the others?’
‘If the spell was well concocted, and my reasoning sound, this will not be the only Ghost Soldier to have fallen this day.’ Relictus smiled—I could tell that the dying agonies of the false soul meant less to him than the death of a fly. ‘I await intelligence from the master-at-arms, milady. I believe the news will be most gratifying.’
I left Relictus in his dungeon, with that squealing sound still ringing in my skull. It would not leave me for many days.
Ten nights later the green agents came again. They carried me to their bright room and pushed more needles into my skin. They had been urgent before, but now their furtive efforts had a desperate edge, as if everything depended on the outcome of this one intervention.
‘Listen to me, Abigail,’ one of them said, leaning over me with a wand that shone crimson fire into my eyes. ‘You are still inside Palatial. This is not the real world. The real world is outside. Blink if you can understand what I am telling you.’
I blinked, but only because I wanted to trick them.
Of course, they won in the end.
Their intrusions into my reality grew more frequent, more persistent, and the alternate reality of the white room began to vie for dominance, becoming more solid, more tactile with each visitation. The green men were doctors and technicians, not imperial traitors or agents of another empire. Slowly, painfully, I began to accept the truth of what I was being told over and over again. I was not the princess of a magic Kingdom; I did not have a stepbrother called Count Mordax; I did not have access to a private sorcerer named Relictus. All these things were figments - woven by a machine that had begun to malfunction, sucking me further and further into its dreamlike narrative.
I was Abigail Gentian - daughter and heir of the most respected cloning business in the Golden Hour.
I was going places.
And yet it was so very hard to let go of the princess’s realm, with all its seductive allure: the power not just to move finance around, but to command magicians, to put prisoners to the sword and inspire armies to ride in my name.
I kept sinking back into Palatial’s grasp. Even when I was outside the game’s green box, it exerted a hold on me. My dreams kept returning to the Palace, to the feudal simplicity of that world. It was a time of celebration and triumph. We had beaten the Ghost Soldiers; left Mordax’s army in tatters.
Of Mordax, nothing more was ever heard.
Much later, when the psychosurgeons (the same ones who had been looking after my mother) declared that I was healed, I learned that the little boy had not been so lucky. His copy of Palatial - the means by which we shared our fantasy, even though we were forbidden from meeting - had malfunctioned even more seriously than my own. They had pulled out a grinning, drooling vegetable, and all attempts to restore proper cognitive function had failed. Now he was plugged back into the game permanently, wired into it on a neural level. It was the only time he seemed content.
I had been lucky. They had pulled me out just in time.
That at least is what I have always believed happened to me. Of certain other things I am much less confident. I was born in a large and ever-changing house on the edge of the Golden Hour, and for a large part of my arrested childhood I had a companion who occasionally came to play. I remember his shuttle and the robots that came down the landing ramp when it was docked. He was a cruel little boy and I do not remember his name. He may even have been the scion of one of the rival families, and there could have been optimistic plans for our marriage, decades in the future. What is beyond doubt is that I had a copy of Palatial, and it eventually went wrong and sucked me in.
If you suppress a memory, it seems to me that two things can happen. The memory may stay repressed, absolutely closed to both conscious and unconscious recall. Or - and this is surely the more likely outcome - the memory finds expression elsewhere. It will seep into other
memories, distorting them, shaping them to conform to the truth of what has been suppressed.
I thought of the Ghost Soldier dying, the agony of that scream cutting through every adult certainty of my existence.
Had we committed a crime beyond condemnation?
More to the point: had I?
*
The last place I remember visiting as Abigail, although it was not the last thing that happened to me, was the room where we grew the shatterlings. It was a huge domed chamber laced with gleaming white balconies and ladders, the vats arranged in stacked rings. Aside from the hum of the machinery feeding the vats and the occasional chirp or beep from the monitoring devices, the room was crypt-silent. Everything in the room was sterile and cold. It felt more like a place of death than the beginning of something emblematic of life and lust. Ludmilla Marcellin had made a thousand clones for herself, but this room contained only nine hundred and ninety-nine Gentian shatterlings. There was a thousandth vat, but it was presently empty.
When she cast her ships into the void, Ludmilla had opted to remain behind. The ultimate paradox of her adventure was that she had to stay in the Golden Hour if she wished to bask in the admiration of the society that had made her. It was consolation enough to know that her cloned facets, with all the memories she had acquired up to the moment of her final scan, were riding out to the stars. If all went well - and I do not believe there was the least shadow of doubt in Ludmilla’s mind concerning that eventuality - they would carry her essence into the unimaginably remote future. One distant day they might reassemble into a single human being, a person who believed herself to be Ludmilla Marcellin, but by then the original version of that individual would be long dead, and perhaps long forgotten.
I could see the attractions of being admired. But because I was not the first, because the idea had not been mine, the acclaim measured out to me could never equal that which Ludmilla was presently enjoying. That was why I had chosen to fly with the clones, rather than stay behind.
In a little while, when my memories had been scanned for the last time, I would be surgically prepared for insertion into the final vat. My growth state would be synchronised with the other shatterlings. My end-state gender would be determined on a random basis. No one, not even the technicians who had designed and supervised the cloning programme, would be able to tell the essential difference between me and any of the other occupants. Via a process of double-blind screening, my true identity would even be concealed from the monitoring machines. They would treat me exactly the same way they treated all the shatterlings. No documents would exist to identify which shatterling was in fact the real Abigail. When I awakened, I would take a new name.
The beautiful part was that even I would not know who I had been. Since my scanned memories would be drip-fed into all the other heads, all the shatterlings would recall visiting this chamber and seeing the empty vat. They would all have the luxury of thinking they might have been Abigail. They would all carry my memories, as far back as they went: the mansion, the little boy, our treacherous games in Palatial. The process of insertion into the vat would render my own memories no sharper, no more obviously authentic, than their own.
I had entered the cloning room alone, but now I became aware of a softly breathing presence behind me. I turned with a shiver, but my new companion was only Madame Kleinfelter. She was very old now, and made use of a mobility exoskeleton. It was silent, enabling her to haunt the mansion like one of mother’s ghosts. Because she still had the authority to visit any room at will, she had been able to enter the chamber unannounced.
‘You think it’s time,’ Madame Kleinfelter said, in a disapproving tone. She was looking at the empty vat, the one I was standing next to. ‘Don’t you, Abigail?’
‘The ships are ready and tested. The clones are close to maturity - they can be released from the vats and brought to full consciousness whenever we want.’
‘And you? Are you ready to become the thousandth?’
‘Now’s as good a time as any.’
‘The house psychosurgeons wouldn’t necessarily agree.’
‘They’re paid not to agree to anything. Or so it seems to me.’ I stared into her deeply lined face, allowing no dissent. ‘Why? What have they been saying to you?’
‘Only that you haven’t had sufficient time to recover from the trauma of Palatial.’
‘It’s been more than a year. How much more time do they think I need?’
‘They won’t make any rash predictions. Maybe six months, maybe another year.’
‘Or two, or three. Has it occurred to you that they only have employment while I’m still around?’
‘There’s still your mother.’
I sneered at the comment. ‘They gave up on her ages ago.’
Something creased her ancient face - acknowledgement, however unintended, that I was correct. ‘Nonetheless, we’d be unwise not to listen to them. When the last scan is made, you set your personality in stone. Everything that’s right and wrong with you at that moment will become part of the shatterlings. They’ll carry your flaws and blemishes to the end of time. Don’t you owe them something better than a damaged, half-healed mind?’
‘I owe them nothing. They’re me.’
‘No, Abigail. They’re not you, no matter how much you might wish them to be. They’re your children. The more you try to force them to be like you, the more they’re going to flare off in different directions like wild fireworks, the more they’re going to surprise and disappoint you. For the sake of six months, or a year, or however long it takes for you to recover fully from your experience ... wouldn’t the kind thing be to wait, before you pour your personality into their heads? If your plans work as you’d like them to, you have all eternity stretching ahead of you. Nothing has to be rushed now.’
‘Every extra second I spend in this house is a second too long.’
‘This house made you what you are.’
‘Then maybe I should have it destroyed, when I’ve left. Oh, don’t worry, Madame Kleinfelter - I’ll see that you’re adequately taken care of.’
‘After all this time, you think I care more about myself than you?’
Whatever answer I had planned faltered in my throat before I could speak it. The machines hummed, chirped and beeped. In the vats the clones drew long, slow breaths of liquid air. Eyes quivered under eyelids as data percolated through the still-forming neural circuits of their brains.
‘You’re right,’ I said eventually. ‘I am ready. I thank you for your concern, Madame Kleinfelter. You’ve been good to me, and I don’t dismiss your advice lightly. But Ludmilla has already left, and I know she has inspired others to make similar plans. I won’t let someone take second place from me. I’ll submit to the final memory scan this afternoon. Then I will allow myself to be placed in the empty vat.’
‘And nothing I say or do will persuade you to delay this?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘My mind’s settled.’
‘Then I wish you the very best of luck with this endeavour.’
‘Even though you think I’m making a terrible mistake.’
‘Even though.’
The cold of the chamber was beginning to reach through my clothes. ‘When they—when we - come out of the vats, will you see us?’
‘I don’t think so, Abigail. The shatterlings will remember me, but that doesn’t mean we’ll have much to say to each other. I’ll be busy elsewhere in the mansion in any case. There’s still much to be done.’
‘Then this may be the last time we ever speak,’ I said.
‘It may well be.’ Madame Kleinfelter paused, becoming quite still, and for a cruel moment I thought that she had either died or that her exoskeleton had become paralysed. But then animation returned to her features and she spoke again. ‘I’ve known you for the better part of four decades. I used to like the little girl you once were very much. The day we had to remove the growth inhibitor caused me incalculable sadness. But I’m not sure I feel
quite the same way about the woman you’ve become.’
‘Thank you,’ I said acidly.
‘But everyone can change again. You won’t be Abigail when you come out of your vat - whichever one you turn out to be. I don’t suppose it even matters which one is you—they’ll all have the same claim on your identity. But if you remember even part of this conversation, do one thing for me, Abigail, in all the centuries of your bright new life.’
‘What would that be?’
‘Try to be a good girl again, just once.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The imago flickered and stabilised. His good eye, the blue one, was red-rimmed with fatigue. Galingale was seated, squeezed into an old-fashioned acceleration couch, with the black padding ballooning around his face as if the seat was in the process of swallowing him alive. His clothes were white, even though the rest of us still wore the black of our funeral costumes.
‘I’ll be within range in thirty minutes,’ he said. ‘Before I cross the line, are we certain it’s her?’
‘We already established that,’ I said.
‘That was before she went off the air for more than a day. That might have been enough time for the robots to refine their impersonation.’
‘It’s her,’ Betony said. ‘We’ll take that as a given. If Campion had any doubts, he’d have been sure to mention them.’
‘It was Purslane,’ I said. ‘She’s still alive. That means we keep to the original plan.’
‘Despite what we now know? That the robots almost certainly intend to break open that stardam? Despite Purslane’s express wish that we prevent that happening by all available means?’ Galingale said.
I was angry with him, but it was a legitimate question; one I could not blame him for raising.
‘Purslane was just doing what any of us would do in the same circumstances - putting the Line ahead of herself,’ Charlock said. ‘It’s brave and selfless - everything we’d expect from her. That doesn’t mean we bow to her wishes. Midnight Queen is still faster and better armed than any of the ships we already lost, including mine. Galingale may still have a chance of crippling Silver Wings with a broadside shot before we have to consider destroying her.’