House of Suns

  ‘I imagine they would be ... vexed,’ Hesperus said, two and half hours later.

  ‘We know the First Machines existed. That’s not in dispute - is it?’

  Eleven minutes: ‘I met them, Campion. It was a long time ago, but I don’t think my memory is playing tricks with me.’

  ‘I’m not sure how you can have met them, but I know there’s a lot you and Purslane haven’t been able to tell me. I’m burning with questions, but the most important one is: where are they?’

  Fifteen seconds: ‘Perhaps when we emerge, we will have a better idea.’

  ‘What do you think we’ll find when we reach Andromeda? Are we even going to be able to exist inside the Absence?’

  Nineteen hours, twenty-two minutes: ‘Cadence and Cascade must have expected to continue to exist or they would not have set Silver Wings on this course.’ After a moment he added, ‘Of course, they were robots. That may have factored into their thinking.’

  I smiled at this far from comforting answer. ‘What do you think they were hoping to achieve?’

  Six hours: ‘To meet the First Machines. To be welcomed as pilgrims unto God. I saw into Cadence’s mind, Campion. That is how it felt to her, as if this was a pilgrimage, with a sacred destination.’ Then Hesperus added, ‘I am detecting something - a change in the local conditions. Perhaps you feel it as well. I think we may be approaching the emergence point. You should hasten to abeyance, Campion. I cannot—’

  Something cut him off. It was sudden and total. There was no longer even a carrier signal from Silver Wings.

  ‘Hesperus?’

  Nothing returned. I waited a minute; ten more. Then I whisked to the abeyance chamber, dialled in one hundred hours at a stasis level of a million and submitted myself to the mercy of the casket.

  A spine of stars arced across the sky, hazy with the light of a billion suns, none of which had ever been given human names. I thought back to the amplified sky over the Centaurs’ world, the taste of strong wine on my lips as Purslane and I sat by the bay at night, watching Doctor Meninx take his swim, waiting with nervous anticipation for Mister Nebuly to deliver his verdict on my trove. I had seen the Milky Way then, daubed across the sky. I was seeing it again now, except that this was another Milky Way - another spiral arm - arcing across the sky of a different galaxy. It looked achingly familiar, but I was two and half million years from home. One grove of stars may look much like another, but I was not even in the same forest.

  I knew I had travelled, rather than simply being ejected back into the galaxy at some other point in space or time. Although the surroundings were familiar, the specifics were not. Dalliance listened for the tick of a thousand pulsars and heard none that she recognised. There were pulsars in the galactic disc, but none of them were rotating at the right frequencies. Even allowing for a million years of slowdown, even allowing for ten million, none of the pulsars could be matched against the fixed clocks she had come to expect. The same could be said for the brightest stars in the sky - those that we would have shrouded with stardams back home. None of them fitted the maps. I was in Terra Incognita.

  Not quite. It was not as if Andromeda had gone unobserved during all the millions of years before the Absence. There was data in the troves concerning Andromedan stellar populations, Andromedan pulsars, Andromedan globular clusters, even the positions and stellar types of individual stars. Given time, Dalliance‘s navigation system might have been able to sift through that jumble of ancient data, extrapolate it forwards, correlate it against its current observations and come to some rough and ready estimate of our present position.

  Sooner or later I would have an idea where I was, even if it did not depend on any nearby galactic landmarks. I was still in the Local Group, after all. I told Dalliance to locate the Milky Way and any other Local Group galaxies she could find, and triangulate our present position. It did not have to be accurate to more than a few thousand lights in any direction. I would settle for knowing which spiral arm I was in.

  Dalliance attended to the task. While I was waiting for her answer, I set about looking for anything of interest nearby. Of Hesperus and Silver Wings I found no evidence at all. I did not know whether to take this as a good sign or not - it was better than finding wreckage, but only slightly. I tried omni-directional hails, but even after a hundred hours nothing came back. The sky was silent except for the mindless squawking and whistling of radio stars and quasars. The galaxy I knew was a-thrum with human babble. This was a mausoleum.

  Dalliance was still cogitating.

  There was a planet behind me, falling away at a third of the speed of light. The planet had no sun - it had either been moved into interstellar space deliberately or ejected from its solar system during some ancient gravitational encounter. The planet was an airless, cratered husk, illuminated by starlight alone, but there was something orbiting it: a smudge of spatial distortion, the open mouth of the wormhole that had carried me here. The Prior machinery propping that shaft open was so unthinkably advanced that it was not even contained in the visible dimensions of macroscopic space. I told Dalliance to calculate an accurate reading of the planet’s course so that we could find it again. Then I asked her why it was taking so long to triangulate on the Local Group.

  She told me she was having trouble finding the galaxy where I had been born. In the direction where it should have been (based on the assumed identities of the other galaxies in the group), there was only a black oval, peppered with a scattering of stars lying just outside its boundary.

  It was a second Absence.

  Dizzy with the implications of this discovery, my preconceptions unhinged, I told Dalliance to assume that the second Absence was indeed the old galaxy, and to triangulate on that basis. This time it did not take long at all.

  I was in Andromeda. My position was defined to within a cubic volume a thousand lights along each side. Now Dalliance could even make a stab at identifying some of the celestial landmarks surrounding us. Six thousand years in the direction of the galactic centre was a stellar nursery known to the trove, still birthing suns and worlds. Thirty thousand lights beyond that was a whipping star, a close cousin to our galaxy’s own SS433.

  I struggled to grasp how everything could look so familiar. In all directions I saw normal-looking stars, drifting in normal associations, following normal orbits. Beyond the stars, I could see globular clusters, satellite galaxies of Andromeda, and other, more distant galaxies. I could see beyond the Local Group, into the sparse immensity of the Local Cluster. And beyond the Local Cluster, the deep structure of creation - galactic voids and galactic superclusters. Beyond the furthest superclusters, I heard the warble of high redshift quasars and the kettledrum hiss of cosmic background radiation. Nothing was out of place. Nothing was abnormal.

  There was no sign of the Absence. No black fog enveloping everything. No black curtain wrapped around the galaxy, shielding it from the rest of the universe.

  I knew then that every assumption we had made about the Absence had been wrong. It was not what we imagined, not in the slightest. It appeared that we had been wrong about the First Machines as well. They were nowhere to be found.

  But someone had reactivated the wormhole, I reminded myself.

  Shortly afterwards I picked up a Gentian signal. It was dismayingly faint, but because it was the only made thing in all that random hissing and squawking of cosmic noise, it was trivial to isolate. If its spatial direction was to be believed, it appeared to be coming from a solar system more than three thousand lights from my present position. Before my hopes rose, I assured myself that it could not possibly be Purslane. Unless she had emerged from a different wormhole throat, she could not possibly have travelled so far, so fast.

  But with nothing better to do, no other clues to follow, I told Dalliance to follow the signal anyway.

  Stasis compressed the hundred and fifty years of shiptime of the voyage to a few minutes of consciousness, scarcely worth the bother of Synchromesh. The signal gr
ew in strength as I neared, unwavering except for a cyclical frequency shift caused by the orbit of a planet around its sun. Occasionally the signal dimmed, as if being blocked by some occluding structure. Whoever was generating that transmission was moving with the planet, either on its surface or in a spacecraft following the same orbit. Time and again I crushed any hope that Purslane might have been responsible, while simultaneously wondering how a Gentian signature had ever made it to Andromeda. It could not be that someone had detected one of our ancient transmissions across intergalactic space, for the signal protocol was much too modern for that.

  I had still seen no evidence of the First Machines, and only indirect evidence of the Andromeda Priors. But as I approached the solar system, still travelling close to the speed of light, Dalliance began to make out awesome structures hanging in space near the star, as large as any Prior artefacts documented in the trove. Prudence dictated a slow approach. I reduced my speed when I was still half a light-year from the signal’s origin, assessing the awesome, humbling spectacle awaiting me. I did not know whether this was the work of machines or organics. What I did know was that it made the grandest works of the Line look like the rudimentary creations of cavemen scratching around a fire. We were proud of our stardams, but they were constructed from someone else’s components - all we did was move the pieces around. We thought we were clever with our wormhole taps, whereas in fact we scarcely understood the first detail about how they functioned.

  The solar system I was approaching was a monument to godlike intellects, godlike abilities. It took the lofty ambitions of the Lines and crushed them underfoot. It told us to come back when we were serious.

  It was a three-dimensional representation of the nested solids of the Platonic cosmos. Each of the five polyhedra - octahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron, tetrahedron, cube - was inscribed and circumscribed by a sphere, represented by a latticework orb. The spars of this enormous construct were thicker than a sun; a hundred times thicker than a world. They were many light-minutes in length, so that the outermost sphere was wider than the largest stardam Gentian Line had ever constructed. The polyhedra were rotating, each layer in the opposite direction to the one it encompassed. The system’s solitary planet circled inside the vast construct, almost lost in that dark, ticking orrery. As I slowed down even further, I watched the planet pass through slots in the spars, its orbit undeflected. The structure was opaque enough to block the planet from view and mask the transmission from its surface, but it must have massed almost nothing. Hazily, I wondered if it had been made from a stable form of the lesion matter left behind by the Homunculus weapons.

  I dropped Dalliance to twenty per cent of light, then ten per cent, then five. I had been sending a corresponding Gentian identifier since my departure, alerting the signaller to my arrival, but there had been no response. The transmission had not changed its nature in six thousand years.

  At one-hundredth of the speed of light, Dalliance passed through the shell of the largest orb. I had been anticipating a response as I transgressed the outer layer, but there was no change in the structure, the planet or the signal originating from it. By now I had established that the point of origin was on or near the surface, within the world’s atmosphere. There was blue water and green life on the planet and oxygen in the atmosphere. Subject to certain caveats, Dalliance had already assured me that I would be able to survive on the surface.

  I fell through the cube, through the tetrahedron, into the interstitial space of the dodecahedron. It was there that the planet’s orbit was threaded, passing through the struts like wire through wood. The sun was six light-minutes further in, nestling within the two smallest polyhedra and their surrounding shells. It was a lantern fretted by dark moving bars, throwing a shadow theatre across the universe.

  I concentrated my attention on the planet, notching Dalliance down to an approach speed of only one thousand kilometres per second. I had glimpsed continents and seas from interstellar space, but now I made out the detailed topography of the surface. As the planet completed a rotation - it had been adjusted to exactly twenty-four hours, implying a human connection - Dalliance refined her maps and scrutinised the data for signs of technological activity.

  That was when she found the orbiting wreck of Silver Wings of Morning, circling just above the point where atmospheric friction would have brought her down.

  My heart stalled in recognition. I had watched this lovely ship shrug off the attentions of interstellar civilisations, barely deigning to notice their weapons. I had struggled to chase her as she dived into the stardam, oblivious to the ferocious course she had to follow. I had watched her rise and fall above the seas of a thousand worlds. I had come to associate her so strongly with the woman I loved that seeing her in this state was almost unbearable.

  Her last act must have been to bring Purslane to this world. The damage she had sustained was so extreme that I could not imagine her travelling at more than a small fraction of the speed of light. Whole kilometre-long sections of the ship had been ripped away, including much of the hull region where her engine was contained. The curved, uplifted wings were buckled on one side and torn away on the other. The tarnished silver of her hull was now mostly black, except where previously hidden machinery showed through. Dalliance sniffed and tasted, finding only a dead wreck, devoid of power. I could send search probes through that twenty-five-kilometre-long wreck, but I knew they would not find life. Perhaps Purslane was tucked deep inside, cocooned in abeyance, but my instincts said otherwise. For the sake of thoroughness I knew I ought to search, but I did not know if I had the strength of mind to wait for the result.

  I tried hailing again. ‘Hesperus. Hesperus or Purslane. It’s Campion. Talk to me.’

  There was no answer. I kept trying, for ten hours.

  At last I turned my attention to the surface, and the origin of the Gentian signal. It was not that I had forgotten it, but Dalliance had already examined the focus of the transmission and found no signs of organised activity. Something was generating that signal, but I could only assume that Silver Wings had dropped one of our beacons as her last functioning act, claiming this nameless world for the Line.

  I still felt obliged to investigate.

  I pulled Dalliance into the atmosphere, touching breathable air for the first time since the Centaurs’ world. I dropped through billowing tropical clouds until I was overflying a quilt of dense green jungle stretching from horizon to horizon and for thousands of kilometres beyond. I wondered about the origins of this solitary little planet. Perhaps it was the only world in the system that had not been taken apart and reforged into the ethereal matter of the Platonic solids. Or perhaps it had been born orbiting another sun entirely, somewhere else in this empty galaxy. I wondered who had scaped it to its present state of biological fecundity; whether it had happened millions or billions of years ago.

  The origin of the Gentian signal could not be localised more accurately than to an area encompassing several square kilometres - it was as if it was being created by a transmitter that large, even though no such machinery was visible. I slowed Dalliance to less than a kilometre a second and quartered the area, searching for something that might not have been visible from space. The jungle had thinned out, the terrain changing to a series of flat, rocky plateaux intersected by plunging ravines. The sheer-sided plateau rose from dense, dark jungle, but their sides were rocky and devoid of vegetation. Some of them had micro ecologies on their upper surfaces, watered by pools fed by rainfall, draining via ribbon-thin, rainbow-banded cataracts. Others were arid and seemingly lifeless. Insofar as it could be pinned down, the Gentian transmission was originating from the surface of one of these barren plateaux.

  I brought Dalliance to a hovering posture one hundred metres above the table-flat surface of the formation. My ship was much too large to land; she would overhang the plateau to a worrying degree. Foregoing a suit, trusting the ship’s judgement that nothing in the atmosphere was likely to kill me quickl
y or irreversibly, I lowered a ramp and walked down, dressed only in the black clothes of Gentian funeral garb. Once I was clear, Dalliance pulled the ramp back in and rose until she was only a hand-sized shape in the sky. Wind snapped at me, warm and fragrant. The atmosphere was thick with pollen and micro-organisms, goading my body’s ancient defences. I wiped my nose on my sleeve and walked towards the edge of the cliff, until my toes were only a foot’s length from the drop. The plateau terminated in a crumbling overhang. I thought of Cyphel’s long fall. It was a long way down, and Dalliance would not be able to react quickly enough to save me if I lost my balance. As the breath-hot wind shifted direction, threatening to push me over rather than away from the edge, I took a hasty, undignified step backwards.

  ‘Sit with me a while, Campion.’

  The voice startled me on two counts: I had not been expecting company; nor had I been expecting to hear a human voice, speaking Trans, that I did not recognise. It was not Hesperus; it was also not Purslane. I turned around very slowly, for the speaker had come up behind me from what I had assumed was a completely deserted plateau. I was glad that I had not brought an energy-pistol, for if there had been one in my hand I would surely have used it.

  It was a man and it was not a man. A figure was walking towards me, strolling in a relaxed and unthreatening manner, raising one arm in welcome. It was assembling out of the air as it moved, gaining form and solidity. As it neared I saw that it was composed of thousands of glass spheres, the same size as the marbles that had entertained me in the playroom when I had been Abigail. The marbles were flying in from all directions, sticking together to form the approximate shape of a walking man. They had been in the air until then, undetected except for the signal I guessed they had been transmitting. An aggregate of machines, much like the Spirit of the Air.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Like I said, sit with me a while.’ The figure strolled to the very edge of the cliff and sat down with its legs dangling over the precipice. It was sitting to my left, a few metres from me. With a hand made of marbles it patted the stony ground, making a chinking sound of glass on rock, encouraging me to join it. ‘Go ahead,’ it urged, still in a casual and welcoming manner, although there was something beneath that too-human, too-avuncular voice that absolutely forbade me from doing anything but obey it. ‘It’s not as if you have anything else to do, is it, shatterling?’