Afterwards, when we had time to think about what had happened, I do not think any of us thought of blaming Celestine for making another mistake. Childe’s modifiers had given us a healthy respect for the difficulty of what she was doing, and—as before—her second choice had been the correct one; the one that opened a route back to the Spire’s exit.
And besides . . .
Celestine had suffered as well.
It was Forqueray who had caught the worst of it, though. Perhaps the Spire, having tasted his blood once, had decided it wanted much more of it—more than could be provided by the sacrifice of a mere limb. It had quartered him: two quick opposed snips with the nightmarish scissors; a bisection followed an instant later by a hideous transection.
Four pieces of Forqueray had thudded to the Spire’s floor; his interior organs were laid open like a wax model in a medical school. Various machines nestled neatly amongst his innards, sliced along the same planes. What remained of him spasmed once or twice, then—with the exception of his replacement arm, which continued to twitch—he was mercifully still. A moment or two passed, and then—with whiplash speed—jointed arms seized his pieces and pulled him into the wall, leaving slick red skidmarks.
Forqueray’s death would have been bad enough, but by then the Spire was already inflicting further punishment.
I saw Celestine drop to the ground, one arm pressed around the stump of another, blood spraying from the wound despite the pressure she was applying. Through her visor her face turned ghostly.
Childe’s right hand was missing all the fingers. He pressed the ruined hand against his chest, grimacing, but managed to stay on his feet.
Trintignant had lost a leg. But there was no blood gushing from the wound; no evidence of severed muscle and bone. I saw only damaged mechanisms; twisted and snapped steel and plastic armatures; buzzing cables and stuttering optic fibres; interrupted feedlines oozing sickly green fluids.
Trintignant, nonetheless, fell to the floor.
I also felt myself falling, looking down to see that my right leg ended just below the knee; realising that my own blood was hosing out in a hard scarlet stream. I hit the floor—the pain of the injury having yet to reach my brain—and reached out in reflex for the stump. But only one hand presented itself; my left arm had been curtailed neatly above the wrist. In my peripheral vision I saw my detached hand, still gloved, perched on the floor like an absurd white crab.
Pain flowered in my skull.
I screamed.
SIX
“I’ve had enough of this shit,” Hirz said.
Childe looked up at her from his recovery couch. “You’re leaving us?”
“Damn right I am.”
“You disappoint me.”
“Fine, but I’m still shipping out.”
Childe stroked his forehead, tracing its shape with the new steel gauntlet Trintignant had attached to his arm. “If anyone should be quitting, it isn’t you, Hirz. You walked out of the Spire without a scratch. Look at the rest of us.”
“Thanks, but I’ve just had my dinner.”
Trintignant lifted his silver mask towards her. “Now there is no call for that. I admit the replacements I have fashioned here possess a certain brutal esthétique, but in functional terms they are without equal.” As if to demonstrate his point, he flexed his own replacement leg.
It was a replacement, rather than simply the old one salvaged, repaired and reattached. Hirz—who had picked up as many pieces of us as she could manage—had never found the other part of Trintignant. Nor had an examination of the area around the Spire—where we had found the pieces of Forqueray—revealed any significant part of the Doctor. The Spire had allowed us to take back Forqueray’s arm after it had been severed, but it appeared to have decided to keep all metallic things for itself.
I stood up from my own couch, testing the way my new leg supported my weight. There was no denying the excellence of Trintignant’s work. The prosthesis had interfaced with my existing nervous system so perfectly that I had already accepted the leg into my body image. When I walked on it I did so with only the tiniest trace of a limp, and that would surely vanish once I had grown accustomed to the replacement.
“I could take the other one off as well,” Trintignant piped, rubbing his hands together. “Then you would have perfect neural equilibrium . . . shall I do it?”
“You want to, don’t you?”
“I admit I have always been offended by asymmetry.”
I felt my other leg; the flesh and blood one that now felt so vulnerable, so unlikely to last the course.
“You’ll just have to be patient,” I said.
“Well, all things come to he who waits. And how is the arm doing?”
Like Childe, I now boasted one steel gauntlet instead of a hand. I flexed it, hearing the tiny, shrill whine of actuators. When I touched something I felt prickles of sensation; the hand was capable of registering subtle gradations of warmth or coldness. Celestine’s replacement was very similar, although sleeker and somehow more feminine. At least our injuries had demanded as much, I thought; unlike Childe, who had lost only his fingers, but who had appeared to welcome more of the Doctor’s gleaming handiwork than was strictly necessary.
“It’ll do,” I said, remembering how much Forqueray had irritated the Doctor with the same remark.
“Don’t you get it?” Hirz said. “If Trintignant had his way, you’d be like him by now. Christ only knows where he’ll stop.”
Trintignant shrugged. “I merely repair what the Spire damages.”
“Yeah. The two of you make a great team, Doc.” She looked at him with an expression of pure loathing. “Well, sorry, but you’re not getting your hands on me.”
Trintignant appraised her. “No great loss, when there is so little raw material with which to work.”
“Screw you, creep.”
Hirz left the room.
“Looks like she means it when she says she’s quitting,” I said, breaking the silence that ensued.
Celestine nodded. “I can’t say I entirely blame her, either.”
“You don’t?” Childe asked.
“No. She’s right. This whole thing is in serious danger of turning into some kind of sick exercise in self-mutilation.” Celestine looked at her own steel hand, not quite masking her own revulsion. “What will it take, Childe? What will we turn into by the time we beat this thing?”
He shrugged. “Nothing that can’t be reversed.”
“But maybe by then we won’t want it reversed, will we?”
“Listen, Celestine.” Childe propped himself against a bulkhead. “What we’re doing here is trying to beat an elemental thing. Reach its summit, if you will. In that respect Blood Spire isn’t very different to a mountain. It punishes us when we make mistakes, but then so do mountains. Occasionally, it kills. More often than not it leaves us only with a reminder of what it can do. Blood Spire snips off a finger or two. A mountain achieves the same effect with frostbite. Where’s the difference?”
“A mountain doesn’t enjoy doing it, for a start. But the Spire does. It’s alive, Childe, living and breathing.”
“It’s a machine, that’s all.”
“But maybe a cleverer one than anything we’ve ever known before. A machine with a taste for blood, too. That’s not a great combination, Childe.”
He sighed. “Then you’re giving up as well?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Fine.”
He stepped through the door which Hirz had just used.
“Where are you going?” I said.
“To try and talk some sense into her, that’s all.”
SEVEN
Ten hours later—buzzing with unnatural alertness; the need for sleep a distant, fading memory—we returned to Blood Spire.
“What did he say to make you come back?” I said to Hirz, between one of the challenges.
“What do you think?”
“Just a wild stab in the dark, but di
d he by any chance up your cut?”
“Let’s just say the terms were renegotiated. Call it a performance-related bonus.”
I smiled. “Then calling you a mercenary wasn’t so far off the mark, was it?”
“Sticks and stones may break my bones . . . sorry. Given the circumstances, that’s not in the best possible good taste, is it?”
“Never mind.”
We were struggling out of our suits now. Several rooms earlier we had reached a point where it was impossible to squeeze through the door without first disconnecting our air lines and removing our backpacks. We could have done without the packs, of course, but none of us wanted to breathe Spire air until it was absolutely necessary. And we would still need the packs to make our retreat, back through the unpressurised rooms. So we kept hold of them as we wriggled between rooms, fearful of letting go. We had seen the way the Spire harvested first Forqueray’s drone and then Trintignant’s leg, and it was likely it would do the same with our equipment if we left it unattended.
“Why are you doing it, then?” asked Hirz.
“It certainly isn’t the money,” I said.
“No. I figured that part out. What, then?”
“Because it’s there. Because Childe and I go back a long way, and I can’t stand to give up on a challenge once I’ve accepted it.”
“Old-fashioned bullheadedness, in other words,” Celestine said.
Hirz was putting on a helmet and backpack assembly for the first time. She had just been forced to get out of her original suit and put on one of the skintights; even her small frame was now too large to pass through the constricted doors. Childe had attached some additional armour to her skintight—scablike patches of flexible woven diamond—but she must have felt more vulnerable.
I answered Celestine. “What about you, if it isn’t the same thing that keeps me coming back?”
“I want to solve the problems, that’s all. For you they’re just a means to an end, but for me they’re the only thing of interest.”
I felt slighted, but she was right. The nature of the challenges was less important to me than discovering what was at the summit; the secret the Spire so jealously guarded.
“And you’re hoping that through the problems they set us you’ll eventually understand the Spire’s makers?”
“Not just that. I mean, that’s a significant part of it, but I also want to know what my own limitations are.”
“You mean you want to explore the gift that the Jugglers have given you?” Before she had time to answer I continued, “I understand. And it’s never been possible before, has it? You’ve only ever been able to test yourself against problems set by other humans. You could never map the limits of your ability; any more than a lion could test its strength against paper.”
She looked around her. “But now I’ve met something that tests me.”
“And?”
Celestine smiled thinly. “I’m not sure I like it.”
We did not speak again until we had traversed half a dozen new rooms, and then rested while the shunts mopped up the excess of tiredness which came after such efforts.
The mathematical problems had now grown so arcane that I could barely describe them, let alone grope my way towards a solution. Celestine had to do most of the thinking, therefore, but the emotional strain which we all felt was just as wearying. For an hour during the rest period I teetered on the edge of sleep, but then alertness returned like a pale, cold dawn. There was something harsh and clinical about that state of mind—it did not feel completely normal—but it enabled us to get the job done, and that was all that mattered.
We continued, passing the seventieth room—fifteen further than we had reached before. We were now at least sixty metres higher than when we had entered, and for a while it looked like we had found a tempo that suited us. It was a long time since Celestine had shown any hesitation in her answers, even if it took a couple of hours for her to reach the solution. It was as if she had found the right way of thinking, and now none of the challenges felt truly alien to her. For a while, as we passed room after room, a dangerous optimism began to creep over us.
It was a mistake.
In the seventy-first room, the Spire began to enforce a new rule. Celestine, as usual, spent at least twenty minutes studying the problem, skating her fingers over the shallowly etched markings on the frame, her lips moving silently as she mouthed possibilities.
Childe studied her with a peculiar watchfulness I had not observed before.
“Any ideas?” he said, looking over her shoulder.
“Don’t crowd me, Childe. I’m thinking.”
“I know, I know. Just try and do it a little faster, that’s all.”
Celestine turned away from the frame. “Why? Are we on a schedule suddenly?”
“I’m just a little concerned about the amount of time it’s taking us, that’s all.” He stroked the bulge on his forearm. “These shunts aren’t perfect, and—”
“There’s something else, isn’t there?”
“Don’t worry. Just concentrate on the problem.”
But this time the punishment began before we had begun our solution.
It was lenient, I suppose, compared to the savage dismembering that had concluded our last attempt to reach the summit. It was more of a stern admonishment to make our selection; the crack of a whip rather than the swish of a guillotine.
Something popped out of the wall and dropped to the floor.
It looked like a metal ball, about the size of a marble. For several seconds it did nothing at all. We all stared at it, knowing that something unpleasant was going to happen, but unsure what.
Then the ball trembled, and—without deforming in any way—bounced itself off the ground to knee-height.
It hit the ground and bounced again; a little higher this time.
“Celestine,” Childe said, “I strongly suggest that you come to a decision—”
Horrified, Celestine forced her attention back to the puzzle marked on the frame. The ball continued bouncing; reaching higher each time.
“I don’t like this,” Hirz said.
“I’m not exactly thrilled by it myself,” Childe told her, watching as the ball hit the ceiling and slammed back to the floor, landing to one side of the place where it had begun its bouncing. This time its rebound was enough to make it hit the ceiling again, and on the recoil it streaked diagonally across the room, hitting one of the side walls before glancing off at a different angle. The ball slammed into Trintignant, ricocheting off his metal leg, and then connected with the walls twice—gaining speed with each collision—before hitting me in the chest. The force of it was like a hard punch, driving the air from my lungs.
I fell to the ground, emitting a groan of discomfort.
The little ball continued arcing around the room, its momentum not sapped in any appreciable way. It kept getting faster, in fact, so that its trajectory came to resemble a constantly shifting silver loom which occasionally intersected with one of us. I heard groans, and then felt a sudden pain in my leg, and the ball kept on getting faster. The sound it made was like a fusillade of gunshots, the space between each detonation growing smaller.
Childe, who had been hit himself, shouted: “Celestine! Make your choice!”
The ball chose that moment to slam into her, making her gasp in pain. She buckled down on one knee, but in the process reached out and palmed one of the markings on the right side of the frame.
The gunshot sounds—the silver loom—even the ball itself—vanished.
Nothing happened for several more seconds, and then the door ahead of us began to open.
We inspected our injuries. There was nothing life-threatening, but we had all been bruised badly, and it was likely that a bone or two had been fractured. I was sure I had broken a rib, and Childe grimaced when he tried to put weight on his right ankle. My leg felt tender where the ball had struck me, but I could still walk, and after a few minutes the pain abated, soothed by a co
mbination of my own medichines and the shunt’s analgesics.
“Thank God we’d put the helmets back on,” I said, fingering a deep bump in the crown. “We’d have been pulped otherwise.”
“Would someone please tell me what just happened?” Celestine asked, inspecting her own wounds.
“I guess the Spire thought we were taking too long,” Childe said. “It’s given us as long as we like to solve the problems until now, but from now on it looks like we’ll be up against the clock.”
Hirz said: “And how long did we have?”
“After the last door opened? Forty minutes or so.”
“Forty-three, to be precise,” Trintignant said.
“I strongly suggest we start work on the next door,” Childe said. “How long do you think we have, Doctor?”
“As an upper limit? In the region of twenty-eight minutes.”
“That’s nowhere near enough time,” I said. “We’d better retreat and come back.”
“No,” Childe said. “Not until we’re injured.”
“You’re insane,” Celestine said.
But Childe ignored her. He just stepped through the door, into the next room. Behind us the exit door slammed shut.
“Not insane,” he said, turning back to us. “Just very eager to continue.”
It was never the same thing twice.
Celestine made her selection as quickly as she could, every muscle tense with concentration, and that gave us—by Trintignant’s estimation—five or six clear minutes before the Spire would demand an answer.
“We’ll wait it out,” Childe said, eyeing us all to see if anyone disagreed. “Celestine can keep checking her results. There’s no sense in giving the fucking thing an answer before we have to; not when so much is at stake.”
“I’m sure of the answer,” Celestine said, pointing to the part of the frame she would eventually palm.
“Then take five minutes to clear your head. Whatever. Just don’t make the choice until we’re forced into it.”
“If we get through this room, Childe . . .”
“Yes?”
“I’m going back. You can’t stop me.”