House of Suns (22 page)

‘We already knew about the three ships,’ Aconite said. ‘Maybe I’m being dim, but I don’t quite see what all the fuss is about.’

We had whisked over to my ship. The four of us were standing on Silver Wings’ bridge, grouped around the central displayer. ‘One of the three ships is making headway on the other two,’ I said. ‘That’s what the fuss is about.’

Aconite scratched at his chin. ‘Now you mention it - that is a bit odd.’

The trio of icons formed an elongated triangle, with the lone ship at the apex. We were all accelerating hard; it was only necessary to look at the image for a few minutes to spot the oozing motion of the grid from left to right, with the magnetopause slowly disappearing from the frame.

‘If they had power in reserve, they’d have used it already,’ I said. ‘There’s only one explanation. I know you thought you saw her being destroyed, Campion, but that third ship can only be
Vespertine.
She must have survived the attack after all.’

‘A direct hit from an H-gun?’ Campion asked.

‘I’m not saying she’s in one piece.’

‘But there’s been no direct contact from Hesperus himself?’ Mezereon asked.

‘Nothing—only the agreed distress code he installed in the ship. Hesperus is the only one who’s supposed to be able to transmit that signal.’

‘Could someone have got aboard and cracked the safeguards?’ Aconite asked.

‘Theoretically, yes - but they’d have to be very clever and very quick, and for some reason Hesperus must not have destroyed the signalling apparatus even though he would have known he was being boarded.’

‘So it could be him - but you can’t be sure,’ Mezereon said.

‘No way to know for certain until we open up
Vespertine
and peer inside.’

Aconite looked concerned. ‘In other words, let him catch up with us and see what happens?’

‘He can’t. We’re outrunning him, and short of engine failure we’ll keep on doing so. He may have some pseudo-thrust in reserve, but given the circumstances I rather doubt it.’

Mezereon bit her lip. ‘So it’s a lost cause.’

‘Unless we go back for him,’ Campion said.

I nodded. ‘He’s sending that signal because he wants our help. He helped Gentian Line in our moment of need. We can’t turn our backs on him now.’

‘I’m probably missing something,’ Aconite said, ‘but if we turn around now, or even just slow down, won’t we be in danger of falling back in range of the killers?’

‘There are other options,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a lot of ships in my hold. Some of them can sustain a much higher rate of acceleration than either
Dalliance
or
Silver Wings.
Not for ever - but long enough to get to Hesperus and back.’

Mezereon still did not look convinced. ‘Can this really be done? I mean, the idea is nice in theory ... but you’re going to be cutting things very close.’

‘It can be done,’ I said. I had already primed the displayer; now it showed an icon leaving
Silver Wings
and racing back towards
Vespertine.
I had overlaid ovoid volumes that indicated the likely range of the enemy’s weapons, assuming they were carrying nothing on the scale of the Homunculus device or the Spitting Cobra. ‘If Hesperus holds his current rate,’ I continued, ‘we can reach him without ever falling in range of their guns. Then we speed back to
Silver Wings
and notch back up to maximum acceleration. We’ll still lose them, and we’ll still be able to make the turn to the fallback without being traced.’

‘There’s an element of risk, though,’ said Mezereon.

I shrugged. ‘There’s an element of risk in breathing.’

‘It’s not that I’m against rescuing him,’ Aconite said, ‘but from now on every action we take has to be measured against the future existence of the Line. There simply isn’t room for brave gestures any more.’

‘I feel the same way,’ I answered, ‘but I also know that if we don’t do this for Hesperus, we’ve got no right to call ourselves Gentian.’

‘In any case, the Line - such as it is - won’t be threatened,’ Campion said, nodding at the other two. ‘Purslane and I are in agreement: you’ll stay aboard
Dalliance
while Purslane and I take one of the ships in
Silver Wings’
hold.
Silver Wings
will have to notch down a bit to allow the other ship to catch up, but she can make up the ground again when we’re back aboard.’

‘And you’ll both ride that ship back to Hesperus?’ Mezereon asked.

‘We’ve talked about it. Neither of us much likes the idea of continuing without the other, so it makes perfect sense.’

‘There’s another way,’ Aconite said, as if the idea was forming even as he spoke the words. ‘If this Hesperus has done as much for the Line as you say he has ... then his preservation becomes our responsibility as well, not just yours. I should take that ship.’

‘Unthinkable,’ Campion said.

‘After everything you’ve done for us? I don’t think so, old man.’ I started to say something, but he held his hand up firmly. ‘It’s no good, Purslane: I’ve made my mind up.’

‘Are you sure?’ Mezereon asked quietly.

‘Resolute.’ He nodded forcefully. ‘I mean it. What kind of ship do you have in mind, Purslane?’

‘I’ve got a Rimrunner scow.’

‘Very tasty.’

‘It hasn’t been switched on for about three million years, planetary. You all right with that?’

‘They built them to last. Just show me how to work the music.’

He reappeared as swiftly as he had disappeared. One moment I was in the bay looking at an iron-black sky peppered with doppler-squeezed starlight, the next there was a chrome and black Rimrunner scow making final approach, as if it had just popped into existence in my wake. Campion, Mezereon and I were aboard almost before the retaining field had clamped the ship into place.

That was when we learned what had become of Hesperus.

‘He was alive when I got to him,’ Aconite said. ‘He moved slightly. He was aware of me.’

But if Hesperus was aware of anything now, there was no evidence of it. His head did not move, nor did his facial expression change. His eyes, which had twinkled between turquoise and jade, were now devoid of intelligence. The only hint that Hesperus was still alive, in some arcane sense, was the continued movement of lights in the fretted windows of his skull. But those lights moved slowly, and their colours were muted, like the last embers of a fire.

Yet it must have taken some volition to send that distress transmission.

The paucity of life was not the most disturbing thing about Hesperus, however: even if the lights had been dead, I could have convinced myself that he had placed himself into the machine equivalent of a deep coma, the better to preserve his deep functions while he awaited rescue. But we were not even looking at all of Hesperus. His left side was almost entirely gone, or rather was concealed or absorbed within a misshapen ingot of black and gold metal that appeared to be partly an extension of him and partly an eruption of the fabric of his ship, which had infiltrated and combined with Hesperus’s own body. The ship was gone, but we could see the clean silvery surfaces where Aconite must have sliced through the mass to free Hesperus.

‘There wasn’t time to think it through,’ he said, as if his actions needed explaining. ‘I barely had time to free him.’

‘Was there any change?’ I asked.

‘The lights got a bit dimmer, I think, but they weren’t bright to start with. I don’t know if that mass was keeping him alive, or killing him slowly.’

‘When the ship was damaged,’ Campion said, ‘its repair systems must have gone haywire. I think Hesperus must have been caught in that - it looks as if the ship was trying to reconstitute him back into its own matrix, mistaking him for some broken component.’

‘Then it was a mistake to separate him from the ship.’

‘Hesperus sent that signal for a reason,’ I said. ‘He probably knew he couldn’t stay ahead of them for much longer. Whatever happens, you gave him a better chance than he had.’

‘I hope so.’

‘I don’t know how we’re going to get him out of that, though,’ Campion said, standing with his hands on his hips, like a gardener surveying a plot of soil.

‘As far as I’m concerned,’ I said, ‘the best thing we can do is put him into abeyance and get him into the care of other Machine People as quickly as possible.’

‘I’m not even sure we have a stasis chamber big enough,’ Campion said. ‘And we can’t very well start hacking bits off him until he fits inside.’

I looked at the slow crawl of the muted lights. ‘We can’t just leave him like this.’

‘We’re not going to,’ Campion said. ‘We’ll scan him, like you said, and if there’s something obvious we can do, something that we can be certain won’t hurt him, we will. But if we can’t, he’ll have to wait until we get to Belladonna. We’ll just have to keep our fingers crossed another Machine Person shows up - a guest of someone who survived—and that they’ll know what to do.’

‘And if they don’t show up?’

‘We’re not miracle workers,’ he said quietly. ‘We’ll have done the best we can. That’s all anyone can hope for.’

The scans brought no better news. The structures under that fused black and gold exterior were complex and intertwined, with parts of Hesperus extending deep into the mass and vice versa. Of his left side, including the living arm, little or nothing appeared to have retained anatomical integrity. There was activity within the combined growth, the arterial flow of energy and matter that indicated ongoing processes. Aconite had been fortunate not to sever any of those conduits when he freed Hesperus, but it was distinctly possible that attempting to free him further would do more harm than good.

But there was something still thinking inside him, and he did find a way to communicate with us, albeit briefly. It was not long after we had made the turn to Neume, the Belladonna fallback, confident that the pursuing ships had now fallen too far behind to track our movements. I was the one who noticed it, during one of my periodic and increasingly despondent attempts to coax some evidence of recognition from him. I was looking into his eyes and the fretted windows when my attention was snared by a tremor at the edge of my vision. I looked down and saw that the thumb of his right hand - the only visible hand - was quivering from the highest joint, as if a palsy afflicted that digit while the rest of him was paralysed into total immobility.

The thumb had not been moving before.

I stared at in puzzled astonishment for several seconds before I remembered what Hesperus had done with the wine goblet. With the prickling sense that this might be temporary, a window of lucid communication that could close at any moment, I dashed out of the room to the nearest maker and had it spin another goblet into existence. I pressed it into his hand so that the thumb lay against the glass, as if that was going to be all that I needed to do. But the thumb merely scratched a vertical white line into the glass, deepening the cut with each vertical movement.

I looked into his face, hoping for a clue, some nuance of expression that would make it all clear. Then I recalled the way he had rotated the goblet in his fingers as his thumb worked up and down, carving out a picture line by line in the manner of a scanning beam. Delicately I took hold of the glass, his thumb still moving, and started turning it, as slowly and smoothly as I was able, and
something
began to take form, not a line but a rectangle of impressions that was too pale and scratchy for me to make out until he was done.

I knew when he was finished because the thumb stopped moving; when I took the glass from his hand and touched the digit, it was as stiff and dead as the rest of him. But the evidence that it had moved was in my hands, scribed indelibly onto the goblet. I held it up to the light and squinted, but at first the array of scratches made no sense at all and I wondered if what I had seen was no more than a reflex quiver. I was afraid that I so desperately wanted Hesperus to come back to us that I had clutched at the meaningless twitch of a carcass.

But there was something in those scratches. It was almost impossibly faint, nearly lost in the noise, but Hesperus had engraved a design into the glass. It was a circular motif, a rim with spokes - like a wagon wheel with a thick hub.

‘I don’t know if you can hear me,’ I said, addressing the mute form, ‘but whatever this is, whatever you’re trying to tell me, I’m going to find out and act upon it. I promise you that.’

I had expected no reaction, and there was none.

O
ne day I learned the true and dire secret of my mother, and why our house was the way it was. It was after another of the little boy’s visits. I had come to both cherish and detest him, like a dark part of my own psyche. It had been a year and a half at least, maybe more, since I had inducted him into the mysteries of Palatial.

He had become Count Mordax. It had required negotiating a series of mental stepping stones, each of which took up at least one afternoon’s session of the game. First he had inserted himself into the mind of a palace rider, who became a spy claiming to have knowledge of where the sorcerer Calidris was in hiding. The rider reached the Black Castle, where he was challenged but allowed entry because he was unarmed and in possession (so he claimed) of vital intelligence. He was seen by Count Mordax, but found that he could not effect the transfer into his mind. The game’s rules were Byzantine, and we had to work them out through trial and error. One rule, which had only gradually become apparent, was that one could only move into another character’s head if the move did not involve too big a jump in social status. A peasant could not swap into the head of a king, even if the king knelt down to kiss the peasant. But the peasant could get there by jumping into the head of a blacksmith, and then an armourer, and then an officer in the king’s guard, and so on - working their way up by discrete steps. Sometimes it would not be possible to change character between one session and the next, but that was all part of the game’s richly involving texture. It was difficult and slow, but because at each step one had access to the memories and personality of the inhabited character, it was seldom boring. More often than not, the superimposed personality was so dominant that one had to concentrate to maintain a plan that might have been sketched out three or four characters down the chain. For myself, I only occasionally ventured from the mind of the princess: hopping from time to time into the minds of her courtiers to make sure none of them was plotting against her. When I had discovered a potential traitor—a maid whose brother had been caught poaching on palace grounds and executed - I had her put to questioning by my master interrogator. She had perished before admitting her intention to kill me, but I remained certain of her guilt.