House of Suns (70 page)

I could only focus on the practicalities of what he was suggesting, not the brutal emotional truth of it.

‘The opener’s inside an impasse. Will it survive?’

‘Unlikely. The impasse is strong enough to resist weapons, but not the energies associated with an engine failure.’

‘There’s no other way, is there?’

‘No outside agency can stop us. Only we have that means now.’

My mind flashed through all the options we had already tried or rejected. ‘Can we abandon ship and trigger the engine remotely?’

‘Abandoning ship is not an option for me, I’m afraid. It would take me much too long to reshape myself, and we have little time left.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Regretfully, it is also not an option for you. I cannot disengage the curtain on the cargo bay, nor persuade the door to open. You could exit via one of the passenger locks in a suit, but without a ship, you would not survive long.’

‘It’s all right. I wouldn’t leave you here alone.’

‘That is considerate of you, Purslane.’

‘What would it take? Do you have to make any preparations?’

‘All it needs is a word from you. Tell me to do it, and the ship will cease to exist.’

‘You shouldn’t have woken me. You should have just done it.’

‘I owed you the dignity of choice.’

I fell silent. I knew he was right. Every path I had taken in my life, from the moment Madame Kleinfelter removed the growth inhibitor from my forearm, had been of my own choosing. Absurd as it was to speak of feeling resentment from the perspective of being dead, that is how I would have felt had I been denied this final say in my affairs.

‘I hope I would have extended you the same courtesy, Hesperus. We’re sentients. We deserve that much.’

‘I sense that your mind is settled.’

I felt more weary than saddened. ‘What choice do we have? It’s simple. Every other option has already been exhausted. You can’t slow us down. That cordon won’t stop us. The Line couldn’t stop us - good shatterlings have died trying, when we could least afford to lose any more of them. I’ll be one more death, but that’s a small price to pay, isn’t it? I’m not even sure why we’re debating it. One human life, one robot life, to spare the galaxy a macro-war between the machine and the organic? I shouldn’t hesitate. I should have already told you to do it instead of talking about it.’

‘I thought you might like to send a final message to Campion. His ship will keep a record of it until he awakes.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You may speak at your leisure, Purslane.’

There was less to say now, but the words came with even greater difficulty. ‘This is Purslane. You’ve followed me all this way, and I’m more grateful than you’ll ever realise. I’m sorry about what happened to the others, to Betony and the rest - we did everything we could, but in the end it wasn’t enough. I’m going to destroy
Silver Wings
now - it’s the only thing left for us to do. It’ll be fast and I won’t feel anything. Clean and bright - a good way to go. Turn around and find the Line again, Campion. Speak for me at my funeral, make me a memorial, and then get on with your life. I love you, and I will always love you.’

Hesperus lowered his face. ‘It’s done. The signal is transmitted.
Dalliance
will receive it shortly.’

‘You’re certain of that?’

‘Beyond all doubt.’

I looked at the displayer again, with the black circle of the stardam and the red icons of that useless, soon to be decimated cordon. There was no sense asking if anything had changed. The message I’d already sent would still not have reached them, and there would be precious little time for them to act even when it did.

‘I don’t think there’s much point in delaying this, is there? The longer we drag things out, the more chance there is of the opener triggering.’

‘That is always a possibility. But I wish to make one suggestion. The likelihood of you surviving the excursion is not good, but you may maximise your chances be re-entering stasis. By some great good fortune, your casket may come through unscathed.’

‘Great good fortune. That’s encouraging.’

‘I do not wish to overstate your chances.’

‘Point taken, Hesperus. But how would you rate yours?’

‘Rather unpromising, if I am compelled to be truthful. But that changes nothing. If our roles were reversed, I feel certain that you would want me to do all in my power to survive, even if the likelihood of that survival was small.’

I could not argue with that, as much as I would have liked to.

‘I’ll go back to the ark. I can set the stasis casket myself.’

‘No - that would achieve nothing. To stand a chance of surviving, you would be better off as far from the ark - and
Silver Wings’
own engine - as circumstances allow. Fortunately, there is such a place. During my peregrinations, I found a secret room containing an armoured stasis chamber, protected by multiple impassors. It is very near the bows, not far from our present position. You must have built it as a precaution against just such a situation as this - your being compelled to remain aboard during a catastrophic engine failure.’

I had no conscious recollection of doing such a thing. ‘I built it?’

‘There’s no question, Purslane. I may only have known you for a fraction of your existence, but I recognise your handiwork. You did well to think ahead.’

‘Just as I did well to stop anyone tampering with the opener.’

‘You cannot blame yourself for that. You never envisaged that you would be the person trying to sabotage it.’

‘You’d better tell me how to get to this secret room.’

‘I programmed it into the go-board. Enter “terminus”. The whiskway will carry you there.’

‘A secret whiskway as well as a secret room?’

‘This is a big ship. It has space enough for a few surprises.’

‘Thank you, Hesperus. It won’t help, but it’ll give me something to pin my hopes on. At least when I go into stasis, it won’t be in the absolute and certain knowledge that I’m going to die. There’ll be a chink of light, for me anyway.’

‘I have had my share of lucky escapes. There is nothing to say I will not profit from another. Go, Purslane.’

There were a thousand things I could have said to him, a thousand questions I wanted to ask. But every second that passed was another second in which the opener might activate, sending its irrevocable command to the stardam.

I said goodbye. I left the bridge and went to the whisking chamber. I punched in the command Hesperus had given me and steeled myself. In the last instant before the field engaged, it occurred to me that he might have been lying; that there might be no such thing as a secret room, and that the whiskway was going to send me into painless oblivion by dashing me against a sealed wall. But the field snapped, the whiskway transported me, swerved onto a track I did not know existed, and after a confusion of blurred, rushing spaces I arrived ...
somewhere.

It was a room, but not one I recognised. As I stepped out of the chamber, darkness yielded to light. The space was smaller even than
Silver Wings’
bridge - little larger than a lounge or kitchen. The walls were square and metallic, with bolt-like reinforcements. The room contained nothing except the emergency survival device Hesperus had already described.

I recognised it.

It was a green cube, densely patterned with mouldings depicting castles and palaces, knights and princesses, ponies and dragons and sea-serpents. It was Palatial, or at least a clever replica of that ancient game. I must have brought it with me all the way from the Golden Hour, across six million years.

It was exactly as I remembered it.

I walked in through the portal in one green face of the cube. Instead of the glowing holographic landscape of the Kingdom, with the Palace of Clouds centremost, there was only a stasis casket, surrounded by multiple impasse generators.

‘Why here?’ I asked myself. But if I did not have the answer, it was unlikely anyone else would.

I settled myself into the seat. In an emergency situation, there was no sense in selecting anything other than the highest possible stasis ratio. I moved the controls to a million. If
Silver Wings
was destroyed, I might be rescued by one of the ships of the cordon within months or years of planetary time. On the other hand, I might sail right past them, destined to fall through space for tens of thousands of years. This time at least I was prepared for an extended stay. Before the restraints tightened, I dropped Synchromesh into my eyes. The combination of ‘mesh, stasis and relativistic time dilation would keep me alive until I was on the other side of the galaxy.

‘Hesperus?’ I asked, as the chamber warned me that stasis was about to be initiated. ‘Can you hear me?’

‘Of course, Purslane.’

‘I’m about to go under. I just wanted to say—’

‘There is no need to say anything. I was, and will remain, your friend.’

‘I hope you can forgive us for the things we did.’

‘Machines may do awful things to the organic if we are not successful. One day, we may both need forgiveness. Until then, you have both my forgiveness and my thanks.’

‘Hesperus?’ I asked.

But there was no answer. The restraints began to tighten. Before they bound me into immobility I set my chronometer and let the Synchromesh take effect. Then I was in stasis, and I had time for exactly two coherent thoughts.

The first was that I was still alive.

The second was that we had almost certainly failed.

Hesperus had a message for me when I emerged from abeyance. I had intended to come out when
Silver Wings
was approaching the stardam, just before I expected the opener to activate. As it was, I came back to the living during a major space battle, almost a micro-war, between the cordon around the stardam and the ship they were trying to stop. To call it a ‘battle’ implies a certain even-handedness to the affair, but in fact it was a ruthlessly one-sided bloodbath.
Silver Wings
brushed aside the local civilisations’ efforts as if it was almost beneath her dignity to acknowledge them at all. But they did not give up, even when they had thrown dozens of ships against that hopelessly invulnerable target. The humans and machines kept coming. I watched with horrified, dumbstruck fascination.

‘I failed,’ Hesperus told me, after I had heard Purslane’s final message to me, the one she had recorded before entering abeyance. He was signalling me from an hour ahead, calm despite the horrific destruction that was taking place all around him. ‘I told Purslane that we had one chance of stopping this ship, by destroying the white ark. I believed it was in my power to do so, but I was mistaken. Unfortunately, I could not know for sure until I sent the final command. There was no way to gauge its effectiveness until that moment.’

He told me everything that had happened - how he and Purslane had come to a mutual decision to destroy the ship, thereby preventing the massacre of the cordon and the subsequent opening of the stardam. He told me how he had persuaded Purslane to take refuge in a stasis casket, so that she might have some slim but measurable chance of surviving the destruction of the ark, the opener and the larger ship in which both were contained.

‘Satisfied that I had done all I could, that Purslane was as safe as I could make her, I issued the command. A moment later, when I found myself still conscious, I knew that it had been unsuccessful. Purslane had been cleverer than both of us, Campion - cleverer than me, cleverer even than her future self. She had already taken measures to protect the opener against sabotage, so I suppose it was only natural that she would have considered this possibility as well. The command was intercepted and neutralised by fail-safe screens I had not detected until that moment. But it is much worse than that. The opener has triggered - I sensed the graviton pulse, racing ahead of
Silver Wings.
I do not know whether my command precipitated the activation of the opener, or whether it was simply time for it to happen, but ... we have failed.’ Hesperus paused long enough for me to think his message had ended. Then he said, ‘We are slowing. You will have detected that already, but I may as well confirm it in case you doubt your instruments. This will make it simple for you to catch up with us, but since the opener has already activated, nothing would now be gained from destroying
Silver Wings.
You may, of course, choose to regard this message as unreliable. I would not blame you if you did. But you may also wish to consider the implications of our deceleration. Left on its present course - and we have not begun to deviate from it -
Silver Wings
will run into the stardam only a few hours after the arrival of the opener transmission. At our previous velocity, the dam would not have opened sufficiently to allow a ship to slip between two of the ringworlds. But we are slowing, and that changes everything. The margin will still be narrow, but I believe that the additional time before our arrival will allow
Silver Wings
to enter the dam. This velocity correction was locked in thirty centuries of shiptime ago, Campion - I believe it was always the robots’ intention to pass through the stardam, and to encounter whatever lies at its heart. The purpose of their mission was to release the First Machines, but they must also have been desirous of making contact with those machines in Andromeda. The robots were intending to make a wormhole traversal, and I do not believe anything can now stop that from happening.’ He was silent again, giving me time to reflect on the scraps of intelligence we had learned from Galingale before we packed him off back to Neume and the tender mercies of Mezereon. The door, the aperture, the mouth - the macroscopic wormhole connection between our galaxy and Andromeda.

I finally realised why Hesperus was telling me this.

‘The stardam may not stay in its open configuration for ever. I cannot promise you that
Silver Wings
will survive the transition - this is not a journey any human ship has ever completed - but if you do not follow, you may never get another chance. It is a long way to Andromeda by the other route.’