House of Suns (6 page)

He shot back a hasty smile. ‘Just seeking clarification, shatterling.’

‘Then let’s be clear. There were people in those ships. You might have killed them, but I’m guessing you opted to keep them alive, or at least in abeyance. It wouldn’t have cost you anything, and you’d always have the option of selling them on down the line. Civilisations will pay a lot for minds stuffed full of ancient memories.’

‘How many are we looking at?’ I asked.

‘I took good care of them,’ Ateshga said.

‘You can prove that by showing them to us,’ Purslane told him. ‘Bring them out, as many as you can.’

‘That will take a little while.’

‘No one’s going anywhere in a hurry. When you’re done with the people, we can discuss the other ships.’

‘The other ships?’

‘That thing I was saying to you just now, about not keeping anything from me ...’

‘Of course. The other ships. I was going to get to those.’

I whispered, ‘What other ships?’

‘Wait and see,’ Purslane hissed back.

It took a while, as Purslane must have known it would, but I do not think Ateshga could have arranged matters any faster if he had wanted to. The people were stored in ones, twos, clusters of three or more, and much larger aggregations. Each unit - whether it held one or a hundred individuals - consisted of an armoured, independently powered shell equipped with abeyance mechanisms and a small impassor; not large enough to swallow a ship but sufficient to protect a sleeping capsule.

Floating in the atmosphere after being liberated from the belly of the moonship, the units were a cloud of glassy baubles, each with a differently coloured and shaped trinket at the heart. Some of the units were very ancient, while others were of a design and antiquity completely unfamiliar to me.

They reminded me of the marbles in the playroom, in the family house in the Golden Hour.

‘Are there any Line members here?’ I asked.

‘Gentian Line, honoured shatterling? Insofar as one is aware, no.’

‘And other Lines? Did you dupe anyone else?’

‘I believe there may be some members of other Lines - Chancellor, Tremaine, Parison and Zoril amongst them - although one cannot of course vouch for their provenance.’

I shivered, realising what a startling bounty I was about to receive. The liberation of members of other Lines - shatterlings who might already have been presumed to be victims of attrition - would inflate the prestige of the Gentians by a huge margin.

‘Have the Line members - and anyone you think might be a Line member - moved into the hold of my ship. There’ll be room if the impassors are turned off as soon as they enter
Dalliance’s
own bubble.’

‘And the others?’ Purslane cut in. ‘What are we dealing with? Nascents? Lost starfarers from turnover cultures, I presume?’

Ateshga’s voice quavered on the edge of some perilous truth. ‘For the most part.’

‘Here is what you’ll do,’ I said. ‘Take whichever ship is large enough to hold all the subliminals. Pack them inside, with enough support machinery to keep them in abeyance until they get somewhere. Then send that ship away, programmed to stop in promising systems until they all find somewhere to live. We’ll be keeping an eye on that ship.’

‘Of course, of course,’ Ateshga replied, as if this was all perfectly reasonable.

‘Now let’s see the other ships,’ I said.

Purslane raised a finger. ‘Wait a second. Who haven’t we accounted for, Ateshga? If we’ve cleared out the Lines and the turnovers, who does that leave behind? And remember what I said about the consequences of holding anything back.’

I sensed vast hesitation in his voice. ‘There is one. He has been in my care for some considerable while.’

‘We’re listening.’

‘His name is Hesperus. He’s an emissary of the Machine People.’

I shook my head in astonishment. ‘You trapped and imprisoned a member of the Machine People, and you’re still alive?’

‘It was a simple mistake. Hesperus was posing as a biological traveller, so that he might journey unobtrusively. Had I known his true nature, I would never have detained him. Needless to say, once I had announced my intentions, I had no choice but to follow through. I could not let Hesperus return home.’

‘Because you fear the Machine People even more than you fear the Lines,’ Purslane said. ‘And rightly so. You wouldn’t want us as enemies, but getting on the wrong side of the Machine People ... that doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘You’ve been playing with fire,’ I said. ‘Now give us Hesperus, before you make things any worse for yourself.’

While we were waiting for the necessary arrangements to be made, Doctor Meninx stole over to my console and bent down to whisper in my ear.

His voice was a rustle of ghost-stirred leaves. ‘I cannot impress on you strongly enough the mistake you will be making if you let that thing aboard. You must reason with Campion.’

‘Reason with him yourself.’

‘He will not listen to me. He knows what I am - a Disavower. I am expected not to approve of the robot. But you are different. If you raise an objection, he will give it due consideration.’

‘And if I don’t have an objection?’

‘You must!’ the avatar hiss-rustled. ‘Let that thing aboard and no good will come of it!’

‘He’s not a thing. He’s an envoy of the Machine People, lost and a long way from home.’

‘It may well be a trick of Ateshga’s - just some robot weapon he’s trying to smuggle aboard your ship so he can hijack it and claim it back.’

‘Do make your mind up, Doctor: are you against Hesperus because of your Disavower principles, or because you think he’s not really a Machine Person at all?’

‘I am against it on as many counts as I can think of.’

‘The Machine People are more civilised than most human societies. Hesperus will just be another guest.’

‘A wind-up toy that walks and talks.’ The avatar’s harlequin face creased into an expression of abject disgust. ‘Haunted clockwork!’

‘You won’t have to associate with him if you don’t want to. And if it really bothers you, you can always go into abeyance until the voyage is over.’

‘The automatic assumption being that I should be the one to go into abeyance, and not the robot? Nice to know where I stand in the pecking order, at last! Relegated by a box full of mindless algorithms!’

‘Doctor Meninx,’ I said, as forcibly as I could manage, ‘Hesperus is coming aboard. That’s final. As shatterlings of Gentian Line, we could not possibly refuse to assist him.’

‘It will not see me. You will tell it nothing of my origins, nothing of my physical existence, nothing of my beliefs.’

‘Then I suggest you keep a very low profile,’ I said. ‘If Hesperus catches one of your avatars wandering around, he’s likely to wonder who’s operating it, isn’t he?’

‘You will tell it only that I am a scholar. It does not need to know any more than that. And I will not have it anywhere near my tank.’

‘Why would he have the slightest interest in your tank?’

‘Because,’ the avatar said, ‘when it learns who I am - as I am sure it will - it will make every effort to kill me.’

I pushed my hand into the open slot of the maker and closed my fingers around the sculpted handle of the energy-pistol. The newly minted weapon had the peculiar heft of something crammed with intricate machinery at abnormal densities. Levators allowed me to hold it, but it still had the mass of a small boulder. The adepts who made use of these weapons normally donned power-armour to overcome that residual inertia, but I did not wish to greet my guest looking like another robot.

I kept telling myself not to be so nervous, but as soon as I chased one fear away, another circled into place. No Machine Person had ever harmed a human being, so the weapon might have been regarded as both superfluous and insulting. But I was about to release a prisoner who not only possessed superhuman speed and strength, but who might have been rendered half-deranged by the time he had spent in Ateshga’s care.

I just hoped that the weapon would leave more than a dent on that golden armour, if it came to that.

‘We’re sure about this?’ Campion asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not remotely. But I think we’ve still got to do it.’

I palmed the control then stepped back briskly from the upright chassis of his cage.

The restraining field loosened its hold on him gradually, so that Hesperus lowered to the ground in dreamlike slow motion. His feet contacted the decking and his arms descended to his sides. He remained standing, but for several moments there was no indication that he was actually alive, rather than just balancing in that position. Then his golden face, averted until that moment, lifted to look me in the eyes.

Hesperus was a gorgeous machine.

He resembled a man in a suit of close-fitting armour, though he was too slender for a man to have fitted inside that skin. His skull was all elegant planes and gleaming curves. The Machine Person was both coldly robotic and searingly human, like an exaggerated and stylised caricature of some stunningly handsome man from the fables of antiquity, rendered in gold and chrome. His eyes were densely faceted mechanisms, shifting from opal to turquoise depending on the precise elevation of his gaze. He had a broad cleft chin. His cheekbones were parallel flanges of chrome, pushing through his skin as if to serve as cooling elements. He had a nose, which appeared to serve no other function than to complement the proportions of his face. His mouth was thick-lipped, the golden lips parted to a narrow slot, with the chromed complexities of his speech-generating systems lurking behind. His skull was gold save for two coloured-glass panels on either side, just above the streamlined representations of his ears. The panels were fretted with a fine webwork of chrome. Behind the facets whirled traceries of pastel light.

The rest of him was no less beautiful; there was almost no part of him that was not aesthetically balanced with the whole. He had a sculpted chest-plate, a lean chrome abdomen, thin hips and long, muscular limbs. The only oddity about him, the only thing that did not look quite in balance, was his left arm: it was thicker below the elbow than his right, and his left hand was heavier, as if he wore a metal gauntlet over the gauntlet of his own hand.

It was the only part of him that jarred; everything else was harmonious. Machine People manifest as men and women, sometimes as children and occasionally as sexless, luminously metallic beings. Hesperus’s face and build left me in no doubt that he had chosen to manifest as a man. He even had a suggestion of genitals, moulded in tasteful gold relief. But there was nothing crass or threatening about his appearance. Hesperus was exquisite, a thing to be admired and coveted.

But he was also alive. Also powerful and quick and - potentially - the most lethal and clever thing that had ever walked on
Dalliance.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, his lips moving even though his face had appeared to be a stiff golden mask until that moment. His voice was a trilling, liquid susurration of birdsong, orchestrated into human speech sounds. It was the loveliest thing I had ever heard.

‘I am Purslane, a shatterling of Gentian Line, part of the Commonality.’ I indicated my companion. ‘This is Campion, a co-shatterling of the same Line. You’re aboard his ship now. You were being kept prisoner by an entity calling itself Ateshga. I have just negotiated your release.’

‘Do you fear me, shatterlings?’

‘Perhaps,’ I said.

‘You have no cause to. I would put that weapon away, if I were you. My intelligence is distributed throughout my body, so it would take more than one shot to kill me. You
could
hurt me eventually, but not before redirected energies had done a considerable amount of damage to your surroundings.’ He looked around slowly, his neck pivoting with the eerie smoothness of a gun-turret. Shifting effortlessly to Trans, he said, ‘Would it help matters if I spoke the language of the Commonality? I do not think it will pose me any insurmountable difficulties.’

We Gentians liked to think that no one else understood Trans quite as well as we did. Yet with one sentence Hesperus had demolished all my certainties.

‘He’s good,’ Campion whispered. ‘He’s
very
good.’

‘You speak Trans very well,’ I said.

‘For a machine.’

‘For anyone not born to it. Please - no offence was intended.’

He regarded me with those glinting opal eyes. He tilted his head microscopically and they flared turquoise light. ‘Nor was any taken, shatterling. Would you be so kind as to explain my predicament? You have mentioned someone called Ateshga, and the name means something to me, but I am still at a loss to understand how I came here.’

‘Then you don’t remember being caught?’

‘I remember details, but not the whole. I recall that I was travelling.’ He turned a palm to his chest, fingers stiffened. ‘Unfortunately, something happened to my ship - a technical fault.’

‘I can probably guess the rest. You dug into your vessel’s trove and learned of the existence of a dealer in ships located in this system. Ateshga lured you in and then decided he could make more credits by stealing your ship than by taking your money.’

‘Is that what happened to you?’

‘Ateshga didn’t realise he’d netted a pair of Gentians. We explained to him that if he didn’t let us go, he could expect retaliation from the rest of the Line.’

‘A formidable threat,’ Hesperus said. ‘How did you persuade him to let me go?’

‘He had no choice once we were free: he’d have been in even hotter water if it became known that he was imprisoning a Machine Person.’

‘In which case I owe you my gratitude. I am still sorry that you felt the need to bring a weapon.’

‘I was worried that you might be disorientated.’

‘Then your concern was understandable. My memory is damaged. Might I enquire as to the present date?’