Godlike Machines (40 page)

At last I am properly underway. The seventh level proves to be little different to anything I have seen before, only on a larger scale. The air is thick with particulate matter-the dust and microscopic debris inevitably produced as after-effect of mineral extraction—and many of the miners wear filtration masks to preserve their lungs. Distant pounding speaks to massive earthworks underway no great distance from here. Occasionally the earth literally moves beneath my feet.

The eighth level is cleaner, and home to a particular breed of miner. More chemist than engineer, they wear white field-suits that cover them from head to foot, rendering their sex unknown. I stand out among them, and feel that I am being stared at.

Before proceeding to the next level, I am compulsorily required to change my own clothing. The outfit I am given is preposterously thick and as heavy as lead. No one questions my decision to proceed, but I am given no encouragement to do so, either. There is a hardness to the silence of those around me. They do not answer my questions. All I receive are terse instructions sufficient to prepare me for my ongoing descent. Why these men and women have rejected conversation is unknown to me.

With trepidation, I confess, I step into the elevator shaft and continue downward.

The ninth level creaks like an aging sea-vessel. Its corridors are dark and cramped, and sparsely populated. No one greets me on my arrival. Only after stumbling around for some minutes do I find anyone at all: a dull-eyed technician who takes me without a word to what passes for an observation deck. There is nothing visible through the smoke-blackened porthole, and I soon desist peering through it. My guide has gone. I am left alone in the groaning habitat. The thick, sterile air is difficult breathe, and gravity seems impossibly to have increased, making my heavy suit even more burdensome. I resolve to leave, and set about searching for the next shaft.

The bottoms are,
Cotton told me,
well, they’re much harder to describe.

At last I begin to understand why. I also understand the reticence of the miners who occupy these deep, inhuman spaces. Language cannot convey what our senses seem to be showing us. I say “seem” because I have yet to fully verify these impressions. The few facts at my disposal do suggest certain interpretations, but it would be irresponsible of me to offer them, colored in any way by the stranger theories that have occurred to me. Like Cotton’s, they are almost too wild to be borne.

The eighth level processes and purifies noble gases in quantities unheard of in any terrestrial mine. Of this I am certain. The Guild only manages such productivity by grazing the turbulent atmosphere of a gas giant. They
could
be extracted terrestrially, theoretically, but then ...

Diamonds are among the anomalous minerals exported en masse by the mines. They can be mined from hard rock via declines and stopes, but I saw nothing like that on the ninth level. Only now, as I stand in awe amid the plasma channels of the tenth level, does it occur to me that diamonds can also be found in the hearts of brown dwarfs.

Again, the Panaion stack
could
be a statistical fluke, except ...

The tenth and penultimate level, if my eyes are to believed, extracts energy from the convection of superheated gases in the belly of a small star.

Words have failed me. All I have is raw data to convey the wonders to be found in these mysterious mines. Images and such will have to suffice.

If this is the tenth level, what lies at the very bottom of the stack? What is that Cotton so adamantly insisted I should see? What phenomenon is replicated from stack to stack, in principle if not in detail?

My access codes work.

I descend to the final level alone, as I have traveled these last two legs. Previously, I have been accompanied by miners heading down for shifts or on their own personal excursions. Some chattered about mundane things; others stood in silence, wrapped in their thoughts and avoiding others’ eyes. The Director has not struck since my arrival in Panaion, but I see the fear of it in their eyes. The deeper you go, the closer death stands to everyone. That was the wisdom whispered on Gevira—which I once dismissed as superstition—and it is writ large down here. Humans are transient. Perhaps humanity is transient too. Whoever—whatever—built these mind-bending spaces, the shock and awe of it defeats individual thought.

The eleventh level—the bottom of the Panaion stack—is a transparent dome just five meters wide fixed to the surface of an angular, rocky body, most likely an asteroid, tumbling with dizzying rapidity in the gulfs of space. I stand in that bubble of air and look up, fighting tears and vertigo, not knowing until this moment just how much I have missed the stars. These are no metaphor; they are as real I am. And I am a creature of the void, not the subterranean depths. I was born and raised to take stock of infinity. The minutiae of the mines almost made me forget it.

Despite this, I can only take so much of asteroid’s incessant rotation. Closing my eyes, I call up blurry snapshots of the starscape and seek to identify my location. None of the constellations match those around Gevira. My stomach sinks, and I broaden my search. There is a band of stars in one section of the sky, perhaps a glimpse of a galactic band. I focus my search on that stellar artifact and seek a match in the Guild’s extensive archives.

There is none. This sky is more than just anomalous for its position—purportedly—at the base of a mine. It is unknown to the Guild of the Great Ships.

I remember the ode to stars that I glimpsed in Samagrinig, where Huw Kindred died. That is what every stack has in common. A different sky. A different view of the universe.

I gaze one more time from my alien perspective-alone apart from a small, automated instrument package, scanning and blinking busily to itself—and then I retreat to the transcendent shaft that brought me here. My quest now leads me in entirely the opposite direction.

It takes me two full days to reach the top of the Panaion stack, and once there little more than a minute to ascertain that the stars visible from the planet’s surface don’t match those at the bottom of the mine.

I call for the Great Ship, but there is no answer.

My grand tour of the mines of Panaion has left me more bereft than ever—exactly the effect Cotton intended, I assume.

“You’ve just come out, right?”

The question takes me by surprise. I am being addressed by a grizzled old man leaning against the railing separating the mines from the wider world, cupping a fragrant cigarette in his right hand. My reply takes some time to formulate. It feels like weeks since last I spoke in conversation to anyone.

“Yes,” I say. “There’s a girl—we’re looking for someone.”

He nods and I feel as though I have uttered something completely unsurprising. “You know it’s a one-way trip. If you go back down, I mean. You only get one chance to come out.”

“I don’t believe that,” I say.

He shrugs and draws on his cigarette. “It’s your decision not to.”

I feel an irrational urge to argue with him. “How could it be possible? I didn’t see the Director checking my ticket as I came out.”

“How could any of this be possible?” His cool blue eyes hold me pinned, like a butterfly. “You’ve seen it. You’ve got that look they all have when they come up from the deep. The sooner you stop asking questions, the longer you’ll last. Trust me.” He broke into a cracked smile. “That’s if you’re still going down.”

“I am.” Cotton could be waiting for me even now, and Trelayne holds at least the possibility of answers to the questions I must keep asking. “It’s my duty.”

“Well, then.” He flicks ash away from him and turns his attention back to the night sky.

“Goodbye.”

He didn’t answer, rudely, I thought. I understand only as I enter the mine’s uppermost elevator complex—heading back to fusion arcs and air masquerading as fresh-that I intended that farewell for the stars, and he knew it better than I.

Cotton isn’t in her rooms when I return to the sixth level. She has left no note. I have no choice but to wait for her, using Kindred’s credit to buy food and a change of clothes. My old fieldsuit was left behind in the deeper levels, and the standard fare with which I have been issued is growing uncomfortable. I buy something sturdier, darker in color, almost black. It suits my mood.

I compose three draft accounts but erase them all. What is the point if they will not be received? I am cut off from the Guild for the first time in my life. I am completely alone.

I dream of stars spinning and galaxies tied in knots. My fellow Guildsmen walk past me with no recognition in their faces. I try to call their names, but my voice is stilled. I hear only the moaning of acid wind, and the creaking of bulkheads stressed almost to breaking-point by surging, lava tides.

In the middle of the seventh night she comes to me, letting herself into my quarters with a key I didn’t know she possessed. She says nothing, and I am too sleep-befuddled to stop her getting into bed with me. I am lying on my side, curled like a child, and she fits herself to my curves and angles. She does nothing more than that, at first, and I lie in the silence with my heart pounding, thinking about what this means. I decide that I understand her. I know what her silence means.

Her quest was successful. She knows the way to Trelayne.

I cannot speak for her, but I know I will not return to sleep this night. Answers and death await us. As with all the mysteries of the mines, words are inadequate.

We wake and dress in the morning. She does take her time at it, as I once suspected she might. When we talk, the subject is confined to our disparate adventures, not the events of last night. It was something that simply occurred, neither premeditated nor particularly profound, between two people who have no one else to turn to. On Gevira she said that she has no next of kin, and in the hard light of this morning, I believe her.

“There’s a place Huw spoke of in his memory dump,” she says over a breakfast of concentrates and water. “It’s a legend. I’ve heard of it before, but I never connected it to Trelayne. Someone did, another agent, and it looks like Huw found a location. There’s a chart, anyway. It leads to a place called Naar: a small stack with one entrance. He was planning to go there, once he found a way.”

“What’s so special about this place?”

“It’s protected by the Director,” she says. “Anyone who goes there is killed.”

“And that’s where we’re going?”

“Yes, but you don’t have to—”

“I do. I am.”

We eat in silence for a minute. I think about death-sentences and wonder if I might be signing my own by not turning back. What price a cure for curiosity?

“You were gone ten days,” I say. “A map’s all you’ve got to show for it?”

“Ten days for you. By my calendar, I was been gone around 40 hours.” She smiles at my discomfort. “How was your trip to the bottom?”

“Informative.”

“I bet.”

More silence.

“I’ve been thinking,” she says, “about the Director. The way it follows us. It struck when we met in Gevira, then again every place we went, including Samagrinig, when Huw turned up. When we doubled back, though, it didn’t strike somewhere we’d already been. It wasn’t until we came to a new stack that it killed again.

“Note also that it strikes just once, when we arrive, and then it goes away. That’s what happened here in Panaion. We also know that it
will
strike, even if we can hold it off for a while. Again, Huw is proof that.”

“That’s true,” I tell her.

“But here’s the thing. When it killed Huw on Samagrinig, it could have taken you or me instead. None of us were looking at each other. We were completely unobserved. But it wasn’t us. It was Huw. What’s so special about us that we were spared?”

That question I can’t answer, but I have another one for her with more immediate ramifications.

“Do you think we can walk into Naar and out again without being killed?

“I do,” she says, and she stares at me as though daring me to argue.

I won’t. There’s no point. We are fishing for facts and theories in an information vacuum. Her guess is at least as good as any I could come up with.

A few seconds is all it takes to break camp. We came here with nothing but Kindred’s pack, and with just as little we leave. I’ve grown no attachment to Panaion and the tiny corner of it I occupied for a week, yet our brief constitutional to the central elevator cluster fills me with a heaviness I cannot dispel.

At the cluster, a delegation awaits us.

“Hello, E. C.,” says a man with a face like squeezed putty and eyes as sharp as needles. “We’ve been waiting for you to show up again.”

A panicky look passes across Cotton’s features. “What do you want?”

“To see you on your way.” His potent gaze shifts to me. “Osred Guyonnet,” he said, proffering his hand. “And you must be Donaldan Luff.”

“That’s ‘Lough’,” I say, ignoring his hand until I know the reason for Cotton’s sudden nervousness.

“There’s no need to be antagonistic,” he says, retracting his hand and addressing Cotton once more. “I only want to help.”

Around us, the cluster hall is slowly emptying as men in light-armored fieldsuits usher commuters and their companions towards the exits.

“We don’t need your help,” Cotton says.

“Oh, I’m not helping
you.
My concern is for the people you’ll kill if you go stumbling across the Structure as you plan to.” His face angles forward. “You do know about them, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Cotton. “But this is important. You can’t—”

He waves away her protest. “We’re not going to stop you, E. C. Don’t worry about that. We just ask that you tell us where you’re going so we can clear the way ahead of you.”

“That’s sounds reasonable,” I say when Cotton doesn’t immediately respond.

She turns to me. “Osred is a Terminus agent,” she says. “He’s obviously seen the trail we left behind us and connected us to the cause. Anyone with a sharp eye and a bit of persistence could have done it.”