“Well?” I said.
His answer came back, clipped and automatic. “Onwards.”
“We only had three minutes to spare on this one, Childe. They’re getting harder now. A hell of a lot harder.”
“I’m fully aware of that.”
“Then maybe we should retreat. Gather our strength and return. We’ll lose nothing by doing so.”
“You can’t be sure of that. You don’t know that the Spire will keep letting us make these attempts. Perhaps it’s already tiring of us.”
“I still—”
But I stopped, my new, wasp-waisted body flexing easily at the approach of a footfall.
My visual system scanned the approaching object, resolving it into a figure, stepping over the threshold from the previous room. It was a human figure, but one that had, admittedly, undergone some alterations—although none that were as drastic as those that Trintignant had wrought on me. I studied the slow, painful way she made her progress. Our own movements seemed slow, but were lightning-fast by comparison.
I groped for a memory; a name; a face.
My mind, clotted with routines designed to smash mathematics, could not at first retrieve such mundane data.
Finally, however, it obliged.
“Celestine,” I said.
I did not actually speak. Instead, laser light stuttered from the mass of sensors and scanners jammed into my eyesockets. Our minds now ran too rapidly to communicate verbally, but, though she moved slowly herself, she deigned to reply.
“Yes. It’s me. Are you really Richard?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I can hardly tell the difference between you and Childe.”
I looked at Childe, paying proper attention to his shape for what seemed the first time.
At last, after so many frustrations, Trintignant had been given free rein to do with us as he wished. He had pumped our heads full of more processing machinery, until our skulls had to be reshaped to accommodate it, becoming sleekly elongated. He cracked our ribcages open and carefully removed our lungs and hearts, putting these organs into storage. The space vacated by one lung was replaced by a closed-cycle blood oxygenating system of the kind carried in spacesuit backpacks, so that we could endure vacuum and had no need to breathe ambient air. The other lung’s volume was filled by a device which circulated refrigerated fluid along a loop of tube, draining the excess heat generated by the stew of neural machines filling our heads. Nutrient systems crammed the remaining thoracic spaces; our hearts were tiny fusion-powered pumps. All other organs—stomach, intestines, genitalia—were removed, along with many bones and muscles. Our remaining limbs were detached and put into storage, replaced by skeletal prosthetics of immense strength, but which could fold and deform to enable us to squeeze through the tightest door. Our bodies were encased in exoskeletal frames to which these limbs were anchored. Finally, Trintignant gave us whiplike counterbalancing tails, and then caused our skins to envelop our metal parts, hardening here and there in lustrous grey patches of organic armour, woven from the same diamond mesh that had been used to reinforce Hirz’s suit.
When he was done, we looked like diamond-hided greyhounds.
Diamond dogs.
I bowed my head. “I am Richard.”
“Then for God’s sake please come back.”
“Why have you followed us?”
“To ask you. One final time.”
“You changed yourself just to come after me?”
Slowly, with the stone grace of a statue, she extended a beckoning hand. Her limbs, like ours, were mechanical, but her basic form was far less canine.
“Please.”
“You know I can’t go back now. Not when I’ve come so far.”
Her answer was an eternity arriving. “You don’t understand, Richard. This is not what it seems.”
Childe turned his sleek, snouted face to mine.
“Ignore her,” he said.
“No,” Celestine said, who must have also been attuned to Childe’s laser signals. “Don’t listen to him, Richard. He’s tricked and lied to you all along. To all of us. Even to Trintignant. That’s why I came back.”
“She’s lying,” Childe said.
“No. I’m not. Haven’t you got it yet, Richard? Childe’s been here before. This isn’t his first visit to the Spire.”
I convulsed my canine body in a shrug. “Nor mine.”
“I don’t mean since we arrived on Golgotha. I mean before that. Childe’s been to this planet already.”
“She’s lying,” Childe repeated.
“Then how did you know what to expect, in so much detail?”
“I didn’t. I was just prudent.” He turned to me, so that only I could read the stammer of his lasers. “We are wasting valuable time here, Richard.”
“Prudent?” Celestine said. “Oh yes; you were damned prudent. Bringing along those other suits, so that when the first ones became too bulky we could still go on. And Trintignant—how did you know he’d come in so handy?”
“I saw the bodies lying around the base of the Spire,” Childe answered. “They’d been butchered by it.”
“And?”
“I decided it would be good to have someone along who had the medical aptitude to put right such injuries.”
“Yes.” Celestine nodded. “I don’t disagree with that. But that’s no more than part of the truth, is it?”
I looked at Childe and Celestine in turn. “Then what is the whole truth?”
“Those bodies aren’t anything to do with Captain Argyle.”
“They’re not?” I said.
“No.” Celestine’s words arrived agonisingly slowly, and I began to wish that Trintignant had turned her into a diamond-skinned dog as well. “No. Because Argyle never existed. He was a necessary fiction—a reason for Childe knowing at least something about what the Spire entailed. But the truth . . . well, why don’t you tell us, Childe?”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
Celestine smiled. “Only that the bodies are yours.”
His tail flexed impatiently, brushing the floor. “I won’t listen to this.”
“Then don’t. But Trintignant will tell you the same thing. He guessed first, not me.”
She threw something towards me.
I willed time to move more slowly. What she had thrown curved lazily through the air, following a parabola. My mind processed its course and extrapolated its trajectory with deadening precision.
I moved and opened my foreclaw to catch the falling thing.
“I don’t recognise it,” I said.
“Trintignant must have thought you would.”
I looked down at the thing, trying to see it anew. I remembered the Doctor fishing amongst the bones around the Spire’s base; placing something in one of his pockets. This hard, black, irregular, dully pointed thing.
What was it?
I half remembered.
“There has to be more than this,” I said.
“Of course there is,” Celestine said. “The human remains—with the exception of what’s been added since we arrived—are all from the same genetic individual. I know. Trintignant told me.”
“That isn’t possible.”
“Oh, it is. With cloning, it’s almost child’s play.”
“This is nonsense,” Childe said.
I turned to him now, feeling the faint ghost of an emotion Trintignant had not completely excised. “Is it really?”
“Why would I clone myself?”
“I’ll answer for him,” Celestine said. “He found this thing, but long, long before he said he did. And he visited it, and set about exploring it, using clones of himself.”
I looked at Childe, expecting him to at least proffer some shred of explanation. Instead, padding on all fours, he crossed into the next room.
The door behind Celestine slammed shut like a steel eyelid.
Childe spoke to us from the next room. “My estimate is that we have n
ine or ten minutes in which to solve the next problem. I am studying it now and it strikes me as . . . challenging, to say the least. Shall we adjourn any further discussion of trivialities until we’re through?”
“Childe,” I said. “You shouldn’t have done that. Celestine wasn’t consulted . . .”
“I assumed she was on the team.”
Celestine stepped into the new room. “I wasn’t. At least, I didn’t think I was. But it looks like I am now.”
“That’s the spirit,” Childe said. And I realised then where I had seen the small, dark thing that Trintignant had retrieved from the surface of Golgotha.
I might have been mistaken.
But it looked a lot like a devil’s horn.
TWELVE
The problem was as elegant, Byzantine, multi-layered and potentially treacherous as any we had encountered.
Simply looking at it sent my mind careering down avenues of mathematical possibility, glimpsing deep connections between what I had always assumed were theoretically distant realms of logical space. I could have stared at it for hours, in a state of ecstatic transfixion. Unfortunately, we had to solve it, not admire it. And we now had less than nine minutes.
We crowded around the door and for two or three minutes—what felt like two or three hours—nothing was said.
I broke the silence, when I sensed that I needed to think about something else for a moment.
“Was Celestine right? Did you clone yourself?”
“Of course he did,” she said. “He was exploring hazardous territory, so he’d have been certain to bring the kind of equipment necessary to regenerate organs.”
Childe turned away from the problem. “That isn’t the same as cloning equipment.”
“Only because of artificially imposed safeguards,” Celestine answered. “Strip those away and you can clone to your heart’s content. Why regenerate a single hand or arm when you can culture a whole body?”
“What good would that do me? All I’d have done was make a mindless copy of myself.”
I said, “Not necessarily. With memory trawls and medichines, you could go some way towards imprinting your personality and memory on any clone you chose.”
“He’s right,” Celestine said. “It’s easy enough to rescript memories. Richard should know.”
Childe looked back at the problem, which was still as fiercely intractable as when we had entered.
“Six minutes left,” he said.
“Don’t change the fucking subject,” Celestine said. “I want Richard to know exactly what happened here.”
“Why?” Childe said. “Do you honestly care what happens to him? I saw that look of revulsion when you saw what we’d done to ourselves.”
“Maybe you do revolt me,” she said, nodding. “But I also care about someone being manipulated.”
“I haven’t manipulated anyone.”
“Then tell him the truth about the clones. And the Spire, for that matter.”
Childe returned his attention to the door, evidently torn between solving the problem and silencing Celestine. Less than six minutes now remained, and though I had distracted myself, I had not come closer to grasping the solution, or even seeing a hint of how to begin.
I snapped my attention back to Childe. “What happened with the clones? Did you send them in, one by one, hoping to find a way into the Spire for you?”
“No.” He almost laughed at my failure to grasp the truth. “I didn’t send them in ahead of me, Richard. Not at all. I sent them in after me.”
“Sorry, but I don’t understand.”
“I went in first, and the Spire killed me. But before I did that, I trawled myself and installed those memories in a recently grown clone. The clone wasn’t a perfect copy of me, by any means—it had some memories, and some of my grosser personality traits, but it was under no illusions that it was anything but a recently made construct.” Childe looked back towards the problem. “Look, this is all very interesting, but I really think—”
“The problem can wait,” Celestine said. “I think I see a solution, in any case.”
Childe’s slender body stiffened in anticipation. “You do?”
“Just a hint of one, Childe. Keep your hackles down.”
“We don’t have much time, Celestine. I’d very much like to hear your solution.”
She looked at the pattern, smiling faintly. “I’m sure you would. I’d also like to hear what happened to the clone.”
I sensed him seethe with anger, then bring it under control. “It—the new me—went back into the Spire and attempted to make further progress than its predecessor. Which it did, advancing several rooms beyond the point where the old me died.”
“What made it go in?” Celestine said. “It must have known it would die in there as well.”
“It thought it had a significantly better chance of survival than the last one. It studied what had happened to the first victim and took precautions—better armour; drugs to enhance mathematical skills; some crude stabs at the medichine therapies we have been using.”
“And?” I said. “What happened after that one died?”
“It didn’t die on its first attempt. Like us, it retreated once it sensed it had gone as far as it reasonably could. Each time, it trawled itself—making a copy of its memories. These were inherited by the next clone.”
“I still don’t get it,” I said. “Why would the clone care what happened to the one after it?”
“Because . . . it never expected to die. None of them did. Call that a character trait, if you will.”
“Overweening arrogance?” Celestine offered.
“I’d prefer to think of it as a profound lack of self-doubt. Each clone imagined itself better than its predecessor; incapable of making the same errors. But they still wanted to be trawled, so that—in the unlikely event that they were killed—something would go on. So that, even if that particular clone did not solve the Spire, it would still be something with my genetic heritage that did. Part of the same lineage. Family, if you will.” His tail flicked impatiently. “Four minutes. Celestine . . . are you ready now?”
“Almost, but not quite. How many clones were there, Childe? Before you, I mean?”
“That’s a pretty personal question.”
She shrugged. “Fine. I’ll just withhold my solution.”
“Seventeen,” Childe said. “Plus my original; the first one to go in.”
I absorbed this number; stunned at what it implied. “Then you’re . . . the nineteenth to try and solve the Spire?”
I think he would have smiled at that point, had it been anatomically possible. “Like I said, I try and keep it in the family.”
“You’ve become a monster,” Celestine said, almost beneath her breath.
It was hard not to see it that way as well. He had inherited the memories from eighteen predecessors, all of whom had died within the Spire’s pain-wracked chambers. It hardly mattered that he had probably never inherited the precise moment of death; the lineage was no less monstrous for that small mercy. And who was to say that some of his ancestor clones had not crawled out of the Spire, horribly mutilated, dying, but still sufficiently alive to succumb to one last trawl?
They said a trawl was all the sharper if it was performed at the moment of death, when damage to the scanned mind mattered less.
“Celestine’s right,” I said. “You’ve become something worse than the thing you set out to beat.”
Childe appraised me, those dense clusters of optics sweeping over me like gun barrels. “Have you looked in a mirror lately, Richard? You’re not exactly the way nature intended, you know.”
“This is just cosmetic,” I said. “I still have my memories. I haven’t allowed myself to become a”—I faltered, my brain struggling with vocabulary now that so much of it had been reassigned to the task of cracking the Spire—“a perversion,” I finished.
“Fine.” Childe lowered his head; a posture of sadness and resignation. “Then go
back, if that’s what you want. Let me stay to finish the challenge.”
“Yes,” I said. “I think I will. Celestine? Get us through this door and I’ll come back with you. We’ll leave Childe to his bloody Spire.”
Celestine’s sigh was one of heartfelt relief. “Thank God, Richard. I didn’t think I’d be able to convince you quite that easily.”
I nodded towards the door, suggesting that she sketch out what she thought was the likely solution. It still looked devilishly hard to me, but now that I refocused my mind on it, I thought I began to see the faintest hint of an approach, if not a full-blooded solution.
But Childe was speaking again. “Oh, you shouldn’t sound so surprised,” he said. “I always knew he’d turn back as soon as the going got tough. That’s always been his way. I shouldn’t have deceived myself that he’d have changed.”
I bristled. “That isn’t true.”
“Then why turn back when we’ve come so far?”
“Because it isn’t worth it.”
“Or is it simply that the problem’s become too difficult; the challenge too great?”
“Ignore him,” Celestine said. “He’s just trying to goad you into following him. That’s what this has always been about, hasn’t it, Childe? You think you can solve the Spire, where eighteen previous versions of you have failed. Where eighteen previous versions of you were butchered and flayed by the thing.” She looked around, almost as if she expected the Spire to punish her for speaking so profanely. “And perhaps you’re right, too. Perhaps you really have come closer than any of the others.”
Childe said nothing, perhaps unwilling to contradict her.
“But simply beating the Spire wouldn’t be good enough,” Celestine said. “For you’d have no witnesses. No one to see how clever you’d been.”
“That isn’t it at all.”
“Then why did we all have to come here? You found Trintignant useful, I’ll grant you that. And I helped you as well. But you could have done without us, ultimately. It would have been bloodier, and you might have needed to run off a few more clones . . . but I don’t doubt that you could have done it.”