Zima Blue and Other Stories

  Then she bowed her head and the recording halted.

  Merlin could feel the almost palpable sense of relief sweeping the room, though no one was undignified enough to let it show. A swelling of hope, after so many months of staring oblivion in the face. Finally, there was a way out. A way to survive, which was something other than Gallinule's route to soulless immortality in computer memory. Even if it also meant dying . . . but it would only be a transient kind of death, as Halvorsen had said. Waiting for them on the other side was another world of the flesh, into which they would all be reborn.

  A kind of promised land.

  It would be very difficult to resist, especially when the Huskers arrived. But Merlin just stared hard at the woman called Halvorsen, certain that he knew the truth and that Sayaca had, on some level, wanted him to know it as well.

  She was lying.

  Tyrant fell towards empty space, in the general direction of the Way. When Merlin judged himself to be a safe distance from Cinder he issued the command that would trigger the twenty nova-mines emplaced in the lowermost chamber. He looked down on the world and nothing seemed to happen, no stammer of light from the exit holes of the Digger tunnel system. Perhaps some inscrutable layer of preservation had disarmed the nova-mines.

  Then he saw the readouts from the seismic devices that Sayaca had dropped on the surface, what seemed like half a lifetime earlier. He had almost forgotten that they existed - but now he watched each register the detonation's volley of sound waves as they reached the surface. A few moments later, there was a much longer, lower signal - the endless roar of collapsing tunnels, like an avalanche. Some sections of the tunnels would undoubtedly remain intact, but it would be hard to cross between them. He was not yet done, though. First he directed missiles at the tunnel entrances, collapsing them, and then assigned smaller munitions to destroy Sayaca's seismic instruments, daubing the surface with nuclear fire.

  There must be no evidence of human presence here; nothing to give the Huskers a clue as to what had happened--

  That everyone was gone now: crossed over into the shadow universe. Sayaca, Gallinule, all the others. Everyone he knew, submitting to the quick, clean death of Gallinule's scanning apparatus. Biological patterns encoded into gravitational signals and squirted into the realm of shadow matter.

  Except, of course, Merlin.

  'How did you guess?' Sayaca had asked him, just after she had presented Halvorsen's message.

  They had been alone, physically so, for the first time in months. 'Because you wanted me to know, Sayaca. Isn't that the way it happened? You had to deceive the others, but you wanted me to know the truth. Well, it worked. I guessed. And I have to admit, you and Gallinule did a very thorough job.'

  'Do you want to know how much of it was true?'

  'I suppose you're going to tell me anyway.'

  Sayaca sighed. 'More of it than you'd probably have guessed. We did detect signals from the shadow universe, just as I said.'

  'Just not quite the kind you told us.'

  'No . . . no.' She paused. 'They were much more alien. Enormously harder to decode in the first place. But we managed it, and the content of the messages was more or less what I told the Council: a map of Cinder's interior, directing us deeper. There we encountered other messages. By then, we had become more adept at translating them. It wasn't long before we understood that they were a set of instructions for crossing over into the shadow universe.'

  'But there was never any Halvorsen.'

  Sayaca shook her head. 'Halvorsen was Gallinule's idea. We knew that crossing over was the only hope we had left, but no one would want to do it unless we could make the whole thing sound more, well . . . palatable. The aliens were just too alien - shockingly so, once we began to understand their nature. Not necessarily hostile, or even unfriendly . . . but unnervingly strange. The stuff of nightmares. So we invented a human story. Gallinule created Halvorsen and between us we fabricated enough evidence so that no one would question her reality. We manufactured a plausible history for her and then pasted her story over the real one.'

  'The part about the aliens fleeing the neutron star merger?'

  'That was completely true. But they were the only ones who ever crossed over. No humans ever followed them.'

  'What about the Diggers?'

  'They found the tunnels, explored them thoroughly, but it seems that they never intercepted the signals. They helped though; without them it would have been a lot harder to make Halvorsen's story sound convincing. ' She paused, childlike in her enthusiasm. 'We'll be the first, Merlin. Isn't that thrilling in a way?'

  'For you, maybe. But you've always stared into the void, Sayaca. For everyone else, the idea will be chilling beyond words.'

  'That's why they couldn't know the truth. They wouldn't have agreed to cross over otherwise.'

  'I know. And I don't doubt that you did the right thing. After all, it's a matter of survival, isn't it?'

  'They'll learn the truth eventually,' Sayaca said. 'When we've all crossed over. I don't know what'll happen to Gallinule and me then. We'll either be revered or hated. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see, but I suspect it may be the latter.'

  'On the other hand, they'll know that you had the courage to face the truth and hide it from the others when you knew it had to be hidden. There's a kind of nobility in that, Sayaca.'

  'Whatever we did, it was for the good of the Cohort. You understand that, don't you?'

  'I never thought otherwise. Which doesn't mean I'm coming with you.'

  Her mouth opened the tiniest of degrees. 'There's nothing for you here, Merlin. You'll die if you don't follow us. I don't love you the way I used to, but I still care for you.'

  'Then why did you let me know the truth?'

  'I never said I did. That must have been Gallinule's doing.' She paused. 'What was it, then?'

  'Halvorsen,' Merlin said. 'She was created from scratch; a human who had never lived. You did a good job, as well. But there was something about her that I knew I'd seen before. Something so familiar I didn't see it at first. Then, of course, I knew.'

  'What?'

  'Gallinule based her on our mother. I always suspected he'd tried simulating her, but he denied it. That was another lie, as well. Halvorsen proved it.'

  'Then he wanted you to know. As his brother.'

  Merlin nodded. 'I suppose so.'

  'Then will you follow us?'

  He had already made his mind up, but he allowed a long pause before answering her. 'I don't think so, Sayaca. It just isn't my style. I know there's only a small chance that I can make the syrinx work for me, but I prefer running to hiding. I think I'll take that risk.'

  'But the Council won't let you have the syrinx, Merlin. Even after we've all crossed over, they'll safeguard it here. Surround it with proctors that'll kill you if you try and steal it. They'll want it unharmed for when we return from the shadow universe.'

  'I know.'

  'Then why . . . oh, wait. I see.' She looked at him now, all empathy gone; something of the old Sayaca contempt showing through. 'You'll blackmail us, won't you? Threaten to tell the Council if we don't provide you with the syrinx.'

  'You said it, not me.'

  'Gallinule and I don't have that kind of influence, Merlin.'

  'Then you'd better find it. It's not much to ask, is it? A small token of your gratitude for my silence. I'm sure you can think of something.' Merlin paused. 'After all, it would be a shame to spoil everything now. Halvorsen's story sounded so convincing too. I almost believed it myself.'

  'You cold, calculating bastard.' But she said it with half a smile, admiring and loathing him at the same time.

  'Just find a way, Sayaca. I know you can. Oh, and one other thing.'

  'Yes?'

  'Look after my brother, will you? He may not have quite my streak of brilliance, but he's still one of a kind. You're going to need people like him on the other side.'

  'We could use you too, Merlin.'
br />   'You probably could, but I've got other business to attend to. The small matter of an ultimate weapon against the Huskers, for instance. I'm going to find it, you know. Even if it takes me the rest of my life. I hope you'll come back and see how I did one day.'

  Sayaca nodded, but said nothing. They both knew that there were no more words that needed to be said.

  And, true to his expectations, Sayaca and Gallinule had come through. The syrinx was with him now - an uninteresting matt-black cone that held the secrets of crossing light-years in a few breaths of subjective time - sitting in its metal harness inside Tyrant. He did not know exactly how they had persuaded the Council to release it. Quite possibly there had been no persuasion at all, merely subterfuge. One black cone looked much like another, after all.

  This, however, was the true syrinx, the last they had.

  It was unimaginably precious now, and he would do his best to learn its secrets in the weeks ahead. Countless millions had died trying to gain entry to the Waymakers' transit system, and it was entirely possible that Merlin would simply be the next. But it did not have to be like that. He was alone now - possibly more alone than any human had ever been - but instead of despair what he felt was a cold, pure elation: he now had a mission, one that might prove to be soul-destroyingly difficult, even futile, but he had the will to accomplish it.

  Somewhere behind him the syrinx began to purr.

  MINLA'S FLOWERS

  Mission interrupted.

  Even now, I still don't know quite what happened. The ship and I were in routine Waynet transit, all systems ticking over smoothly. I was deep in thought, a little drunk, rubbing clues together like a caveman trying to make fire with rocks, hoping for the spark that would point me towards The Gun, the one no one ever thinks I'm going to find, the one I know with every fibre of my existence is out there somewhere. I was imagining the reception I'd get when I returned to the Cohort with that prize, the slate of all my sins wiped clean when they saw that I'd actually found it, that it was real after all, and that finally we had something to use against the Huskers. In the pleasant mental haze brought on by the wine, it seemed likely that they'd forgive me anything.

  Then it happened: a violent lurch that sent wine and glass flying across the cabin, a shriek from the ship's alarms as it went into panic-mode. I knew right away that this was no ordinary Way turbulence. The ship was tumbling badly, but I fought my way to the command deck and did what I could to bring her back under control. Seat-of-the-pants flying, the way Gallinule and I used to do it on Plenitude, when Plenitude still existed.

  That was when I knew we were outside the Waynet, dumped back into the crushing slowness of normal space. The stars outside were stationary, their colours showing no suggestion of relativistic distortion.

  'Damage?' I asked.

  'How long have you got?' the ship snapped back.

  I told it to ease off on the wisecracks and start giving me the bad news. And it most certainly was bad news. The precious syrinx was still functional - I touched it and felt the familiar tremble that indicated it was still sensing the nearby Waynet - but that was about the only flight-critical system that hadn't been buckled or blown or simply wiped out of existence by the unscheduled egress.

  We were going to have to land and make repairs. For a few weeks or months - however long it took the ship to scavenge and process the raw materials it needed to fix itself - the search for my Gun would be on hold.

  That didn't mean I was counting on a long stopover.

  The ship still had a slow tumble. Merlin squinted against hard white glare as the burning eye of a bright sun hove into view through the windows. It was white, but not killingly so. Probably a mid-sequence star, maybe a late F- or early G-type. He thought there was a hint of yellow. Had to be pretty close too.

  'Tell me where we are.'

  'It's called Calliope,' Tyrant told him. 'G-type. According to the last Cohort census the system contained fifteen planet-class bodies. There were five terrestrials, four of which were uninhabitable. The fifth - the furthest from Calliope - was supposedly colonised by humans in the early Flourishing.'

  Merlin glanced at the census data as it scrolled down the cabin wall. The planet in question was called Lecythus. It was a typical watery terrestrial, like a thousand others in his experience. It even had the almost-obligatory large single moon.

  'Been a while, ship. What are the chances of anyone still being down there?'

  'Difficult to say. A later Cohort flyby failed to make contact with the settlement, but that doesn't mean no one was alive. After the emergence of the Huskers, many planetary colonies went to great lengths to camouflage themselves against the aliens.'

  'So there could still be a welcoming committee.'

  'We'll see. With your permission, I'll use our remaining fuel to reach Lecythus. This will take some time. Would you like to sleep?'

  Merlin looked back at the coffin-like slab of the frostwatch cabinet. He could skip over the days or weeks it would take to reach the planet, but that would mean subjecting himself to the intense unpleasantness of frostwatch revival. Merlin had never taken kindly to being woken from normal sleep, let alone the deep hibernation of frostwatch.

  'Pass on that, I think. I've still got plenty of reading to catch up on.'

  Later - much later - Tyrant announced that they had reached orbit around Lecythus. 'Would you like to see the view?' the ship asked, with a playful note in its voice.

  Merlin scratched fatigue from his eyes. 'You sound like you know something I don't.'

  Merlin was at first reassured by what he saw. There was blue ocean down there, swatches of green and brown land mass, large islands rather than any major continental masses, cyclonic swirls of water-vapour clouds. It didn't necessarily mean there were still people, but it was a lot more encouraging than finding a cratered, radioactive corpse of a world.

  Then he looked again. Many of those green and brown swatches of land mass were surrounded by water, as his first glimpse had indicated. But some of them appeared to be floating above the ocean completely, casting shadows beneath them. His glance flicked to the horizon, where the atmosphere was compressed into a thin bow of pure indigo. He could see the foreshortened shapes of hovering land masses, turned nearly edge-on. The land masses appeared to be one or two kilometres thick, and they all appeared to be gently curved. Perhaps half were concave in shape, so their edges were slightly upturned. The edges were frosted white, like the peaks of mountain ranges. Some of the concave masses even had little lakes near their centres. The convex masses were all a scorched tawny grey in colour, devoid of water or vegetation, save for a cap of ice at their highest point. The largest shapes, convex or concave, must have been hundreds of kilometres wide. Merlin judged that there must have been at least ten kilometres of clear airspace under each piece. A third of the planet's surface was obscured by the floating shapes.

  'Any idea what we're looking at here?' Merlin asked. 'This doesn't look like anything in the census.'

  'I think they built an armoured sky around their world,' the ship said. 'And then something - very probably Husker-level ordnance - shattered that sky.'

  'No one could have survived that,' Merlin said, feeling a rising tide of sadness. Tyrant was clever enough, but there were times - long times - when Merlin became acutely aware of the heartless machine lurking behind the personality. And then he felt very, very alone. Those were the hours when he would have done anything for companionship, including returning to the Cohort and the tribunal that undoubtedly awaited him.

  'Someone does appear to have survived, Merlin.'

  He perked up. 'Really?'

  'It's unlikely to be a very advanced culture: no neutrino or gravimagnetic signatures, beyond those originating from the mechanisms that must still be active inside the sky pieces. But I did detect some very brief radio emissions.'

  'What language were they using? Main? Tradespeak? Anything else in the Cohort database?'

  'They were usin
g long beeps and short beeps. I'm afraid I didn't get the chance to determine the source of the transmission.'

  'Keep listening. I want to meet them.'

  'Don't raise your hopes. If there are people down there, they've been out of contact with the rest of humanity for a considerable number of millennia.'

  'I only want to stop for repairs. They can't begrudge me that, can they?'

  'I suppose not.'

  Then something occurred to Merlin, something he realised he should have asked much earlier. 'About the accident, ship. I take it you know why we were dumped out of the Waynet?'