House of Suns

  ‘You have a theory that fits the evidence.’

  ‘Well, almost. But if all you were supposed to do was monitor the Andromeda Priors, why the secrecy?’

  ‘We are being very open with each other now.’

  ‘I know - but there’s no reason to think you won’t tinker with my memory before I leave. Thing is, if the Priors were the issue, there’d be no need to be coy about it. They’d be a problem we all needed to know about - Lines and turnover civilisations included.’

  ‘Secrecy might be more important than you realise,’ the curator said. ‘It wouldn’t do for a single culture to take unilateral action, yet that could easily have happened if knowledge of the Andromeda Priors was widespread.’

  ‘We could have stopped them, if it came to that.’

  ‘Not necessarily. If a civilisation built a fleet and launched it towards Andromeda, there’s no guarantee that the Lines would have been able to neutralise it before it arrived. And even if the turnover civilisation perished, the fleet would still be on its way, protected by time-dilation. Nothing would have been able to catch up with it, if it was moving sufficiently close to light.’

  ‘Fine, so there’s a case for secrecy. But turnover civilisations aren’t stupid. Some of them would have made their own observations of Andromeda, and seen the same evidence of Prior manipulation.’

  ‘The signs might have been subtle enough that it took the observational resources of the Vigilance to recognise them. In any case, turnover civilisations tend to be more interested in their immediate neighbours in the galactic disc than with what might be happening two and half million lights away.’

  The curator had not denied an official interest in Andromeda. It might not mean anything, but it was at least a crumb of intelligence to take with me back to the Line. It would add little to what was already known, but it would at least bolster the existing lines of argument, adding credibility to the Commonality’s pet theory.

  ‘Thank you for discussing these matters,’ I said, sensing that I had pushed about as far as was wise.

  ‘It’s our pleasure. We have always had great respect for the Lines, and value their confidentiality.’

  ‘I will report every detail of my experiences here.’

  ‘I would expect nothing less.’ Above me, the ceiling heaved tremendously, like the sail of a ship catching the wind - it was as if the curator had given a titanic sigh. ‘But now to business, so to speak. I have completed the preliminary examination of the contents of your trove.’

  ‘I hope you didn’t find the contents too disappointing.’

  ‘You understate the value of your trove. There is data in it of at least partial interest to us.’

  ‘I’m pleased not to have wasted your time. Feel free to copy anything that is of the slightest use to you.’

  ‘And your fee for this service?’

  ‘There is none. I was given licence to gift you with any data you desire as a token of the gratitude and friendship of Gentian Line, in the hope of continued good relations.’

  ‘That hardly seems fair, shatterling.’

  ‘It hardly seems fair to make you pay for data we know to be stale.’

  ‘All data is stale. The photons reaching your eyes are stale. They tell you that you are looking at something real, but you have no information that the objects before you still exist. They may have vanished into oblivion the instant those photons took wing.’

  ‘I take your point, but we still won’t charge.’

  ‘Then it is up to the Vigilance to make a reciprocal gesture. You have come here as an envoy, but you doubtless wouldn’t turn down the chance to wander our archives.’

  ‘No,’ I said, as cautiously as I dared - fearful that the offer might be snatched away if I clawed at it too eagerly. ‘1 wouldn’t turn it down.’

  ‘I have been in consultation with my fellow curators. Provided your data passes certain rudimentary validation tests, we see no difficulty in granting you a temporary access permit. You would be at liberty to consult and record data in our top-level archives. You would be able to consult, but not record, data in the secondary levels. You would be permitted to commit data to memory, but only using normal mnemonic capture modules. Third-level and deep-kernel data files will not be accessible to you.’

  ‘I would consider any offer to be above and beyond our expectations. What you propose is most generous, and I would be flattered to accept.’

  ‘Very good, shatterling. With your permission, the trove will remain in my gut until it has been subjected to a comprehensive examination.’

  ‘That’s acceptable.’

  ‘Good. You may leave via my lower digestive tract - the exit is opening now.’ As I watched, the fronds parted near the middle of the floor to reveal a glistening shaft that had been hidden until then. ‘You will not have to return to the faceplate once you have emerged from my rectum,’ the curator went on. ‘There is a waste-release spigot in my posterior armour.’

  ‘That’s ... very helpful,’ I said.

  ‘It might be unwise to jump to conclusions, but on the assumption that your trove passes validation, there should be no obstacles to issuing you with an immediate access permit. If you have no need to return to your ship, you can begin examining the archive immediately.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You mentioned that the permit will be temporary. Can you give me an idea of when it will expire?’

  ‘This is your first visit to us, shatterling. Our relationship has got off to a good start, but we must take things gradually. Will two hundred years be sufficient, just to begin with?’

  CHAPTER SIX

  I raised my drink to Hesperus, his gold face splintering into disorganised facets through the wine glass. He was sitting on the other side of the table, with Doctor Meninx to his right and my fellow shatterling to his left.

  ‘To you, Hesperus,’ I said. ‘To the safe recovery of your memories, to your reunion with the Machine People, to the future and to the good things we may accomplish as allies.’

  ‘To Hesperus,’ Campion said, emptying half his glass in a single swig.

  Hesperus raised his own glass and nodded. He took a sip of the wine, enough to make it clear that he had really drunk it rather than just swilled it around in his mouth for appearance’s sake.

  ‘Thank you. It is very good to feel that I am amongst friends. You have been most gracious hosts.’

  ‘All the same - if there’s anything you need, anything we can do to make you more comfortable—’

  ‘There really is nothing,’ he told Campion. ‘Save for the damage inflicted by Ateshga, I am in excellent working order. I am even beginning to recover some sense of my past.’

  ‘It’s coming back?’ I asked.

  ‘Slowly. The damage is great, but my repair routines are efficient and well evolved.’

  ‘While we’re on the subject of damage,’ Doctor Meninx’s avatar said, ‘I can’t help noticing that arm of yours.’

  ‘My arm, Doctor?’

  ‘Yes—the left one. The one that’s conspicuously larger than the other. Or had that somehow escaped your attention?’

  Hesperus shifted awkwardly, glancing at Campion and me in turn. ‘Does it trouble you, Doctor?’

  The harlequin flexed back in his seat. ‘Why should it trouble me?’

  ‘Because you raised the matter.’

  ‘Only out of profound concern for your wellbeing.’

  ‘It is most kind of you to show that concern, but I assure you there is no reason for alarm. I have detected no abnormalities in my functioning.’

  We were in Campion’s dining room, a few hundred metres aft of Dalliance’s bridge. Fake windows made it appear as if we were in a kind of gondola suspended under the gentle curve of her hull. Campion had even turned on the fake stars, creating the illusion that we were flying through a blizzard of suns, with stars slamming by on either side of the dining room, occasionally accompanied by little whirling orreries of planets.

 
‘All the same, it is rather ... odd,’ Doctor Meninx persisted. ‘But we shall make no more of it. I have no wish to draw attention to your flaws: I am sure they are difficult enough to bear as it is.’

  ‘That is very considerate of you,’ said our robot guest.

  After an uncomfortable silence, Campion said, ‘I’m sure we’re all very curious to know what you’ve remembered, Hesperus. Did you get anything from the trove entry on the Vigilance?’

  Doctor Meninx’s avatar leaned in Hesperus’s direction, creasing at the waist like a bent playing card. ‘What possible interest would you have in the Vigilance?’

  ‘He’s got just as much right to be interested in it as you have,’ I said.

  ‘I shall bow to the doctor’s superior wisdom in this matter,’ Hesperus answered, acknowledging Meninx with a microscopic nod. ‘All that I know of the Vigilance with any certainty is what I have gleaned from Campion’s trove. That has been a most rewarding exercise, but I still cannot shake the sense that I had some prior interest in the matter.’

  ‘Could that have been the nature of your mission?’ asked Campion.

  ‘What mission?’ I queried, before Doctor Meninx could get a word in edgeways.

  ‘That may be the case,’ Hesperus answered, with a certain diffidence. I noticed that he was scratching the tip of his thumb against the glass of the wine goblet, the thumb blurring up and down almost too quickly to see, as if Hesperus was unaware of the gesture. ‘All that I can say for certain is that, beneath the scrambled chaos of my memories, I feel a driving imperative, a sense of some vital task that I must complete, and which has not yet reached cessation. But I could be completely mistaken. Perhaps I was simply a tourist, ambling his way from sight to sight with no greater goal than to accumulate memories and experience - much like yourselves, in fact.’

  ‘But if you do feel that driving imperative ... maybe there’s something to it,’ I said.

  ‘I cannot deny a sense of restlessness, as if I have delayed long enough.’ He ceased scratching the glass with his thumb and tilted it gently, swilling the wine inside it, mesmerised for a few moments by the play of light and fluid, as if it was the single most fascinating thing in the universe. ‘One can only trust that being reunited with my fellows will help quieten my concerns. In the meantime, your hospitality is the finest I could hope for.’ He raised the glass. ‘Another toast, I think. To the prosperity and longevity of Gentian Line. Long may it endure.’

  Campion and I reciprocated with our glasses, chinking them together above the table. I looked sternly at Doctor Meninx until he followed suit.

  ‘I hope you’ll enjoy the Thousand Nights,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how this reunion will compare with others we’ve held, but I can more or less guarantee that you won’t find a better one hosted by any other Line. We’ve always thrown the best parties.’

  ‘Will you enter abeyance shortly?’ Hesperus asked.

  ‘Campion and I have a little groundwork to cover before we can sleep.’

  ‘They have stories to fabricate,’ Doctor Meninx said, with unconcealed delight. ‘Strands to edit, memories to delete, others to falsify, all to play down the extent to which they have consorted. Of course, I know the full and sordid truth, rendering the exercise rather pointless.’

  ‘And we know you’re a Disavower,’ I said. ‘Keep that in mind before you start blabbing to the rest of our Line - you might find the reception turns a bit frosty when everyone gets wind of what a nasty, bigoted specimen you really are.’

  ‘The doctor makes it sound worse than it is,’ Campion said, smiling fiercely. ‘We’re not trying to create false alibis here. We’re just moving some facts around. It’s probably a pointless exercise, but if we can keep it down to one or two brief encounters, maybe we’ll get away with the Line’s equivalent of a large slap on the wrists.’

  ‘Does this not create risks?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Campion said, ‘but what choice do we have?’

  ‘When you delete a memory from a strand - from the public record, so to speak - what happens to the memory you retain in your head? Must it also be deleted?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ignoring the awkward look Campion was sending me. ‘We don’t delete those memories, although we certainly could if we wanted - the process is easy enough. As a matter of fact, Campion thinks we would be on safer ground if we did.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ Hesperus said. ‘I did not wish to steer the conversation in an uncomfortable direction.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I replied, sighing. ‘Look, Campion and I agree on ninety-nine things out of a hundred. But the one thing we don’t agree on - all right, one of the several things - is what we do with those memories that don’t fit the story. I say we keep them. Campion says delete them, so that we never give Fescue or Betony or any of the others anything to use against us. And, damn it, I see his point. However, I just don’t think that an experience is worth anything unless you can remember it afterwards.’ I gazed down into the bottom of my glass, empty now. ‘To see something marvellous with your own eyes - that’s wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you’ll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold an incomplete half of it, and that it won’t ever really exist as a whole until you’re together, talking or thinking about that moment ... that’s worth more than one plus one. It’s worth four, or eight, or some number so large we can’t even imagine it. I think I’d rather die than lose those memories.’

  ‘I find your convictions admirable. I did not know the value of memory until I lost mine.’

  ‘I think I need to adjust my tank chemistry,’ said Doctor Meninx. ‘All of a sudden I feel nauseous.’

  ‘I would be more than happy to come down and adjust your tank chemistry,’ Hesperus said.

  ‘He threatened me!’ shrieked the paper cut-out. ‘Did you both hear that? He threatened me!’

  Hesperus moved to stand up. ‘I think it would be better if I retired. It is clear that Doctor Meninx cannot see beyond the ghoulish figments of his imagination. It is a shame, since I have found this conversation to be most stimulating.’

  ‘Really?’ I asked.

  ‘Very much so. Only a little while ago - while we were discussing the origin of my people, and the hypothetical nature of my mission - something popped quite unbidden into my head. I cannot help but feel it is a memory of more than average significance. I hope you will not mind what I have done.’

  ‘Mind what?’ I asked.

  Hesperus held up his goblet and rotated it slowly, so that the side that had been facing him came into clear view. Engraved into the glass was a tiny, densely detailed design. Even across the table, the intricacy of the picture was astonishing, its lines as bright and thin as laser-burns. I thought back to the way he had been scratching the tip of his thumb against the goblet; as I replayed the memory, I thought I could see him rotating the glass very slowly and precisely with the other fingers, using the thumb to scratch out a two-dimensional image in a series of precise vertical raster lines. While he had been doing that, we had appeared to have his full and undivided attention.

  ‘Would it inconvenience you awfully if I kept the glass?’ Hesperus asked.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I climbed the iron ladder up to the top of Doctor Meninx’s immersion tank. Beneath my feet, the grilled decking throbbed with the ceaseless labour of pumps and filtration systems. Under the grillework was bottle-green glass, thick enough to afford only murky glimpses of the floating occupant. I moved forward to the front of the tank and knelt down. I unfastened toggles and folded back a section of decking on squealing hinges until it lay flat against another part, revealing an access cover in the top of the tank. Steadying myself so as not to topple over the side, I gave the cover a hefty anticlockwise twist. After several rotations I was able to swing it open away from me.

  Under the cover was a circular hole bored clean th
rough the glass, which was as thick as my hand, and under the glass was dark, bubbling liquid. I adjusted my position until I could put my face into the hole and into the water. It was not actually water, I knew, but rather a blood-warm chemical concoction that not only supported Doctor Meninx against gravity and allowed him to breathe, but also provided him with various nutrient functions, absorbed through his skin and those internal membranes with which it came into contact.

  My poorly focused eyes peered into that nutrient soup and made out something: a large, dark form, barnacled in places, tapering at the front, with the suggestive gleam of eyes set into trenches along the side of what I chose to think of as the head. They might not have been eyes at all, but rather some other highly specialised sensory organ, or maybe even just a functionless growth of some kind. I think I saw a limb or flipper emerging from his flanks, but since I was looking into even deeper darkness at that point, I could not be sure.

  With my face submerged to the ears, I said, ‘I’m here. What is it you so badly needed to tell me in person, Doctor?’

  ‘It concerns Hesperus.’ His voice was a gurgling rumble that I could just about understand. ‘What else?’