House of Suns (74 page)

‘Gentian Line?’

‘Exactly.’

‘We’re finished. For all I know, I’m the last one left.’

‘I don’t think so, shatterling.’

Parts of him had begun to detach. Marbles were peeling away, taking flight, vanishing into the air. He touched a diminished hand to his forehead, absent-mindedly. ‘I should have mentioned it already. You exited the wormhole a little over three thousand years ago, by your reckoning?’

I nodded uneasily. ‘Give or take.’

‘Silver Wings
of Morning came out much earlier. She was damaged by the transit, incapable of fast flight. She reached orbit around this world seventeen and a half thousand years ago.’

I felt as if the rock had finally given way beneath me - all hope gone. It had been there for a second, like the sun breaking through a crack in the clouds, bringing a glint of daylight. Now the clouds had closed over, heavier than before.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I told you that the wormhole is still settling down. That’s what happens. You’ll just have to live with it, until things stabilise. You’ll cope. It’s not as if you haven’t already had some experience with deep time.’

‘You told me you found Hesperus. What happened to Purslane? Did you find her in stasis?’

‘I found the robot. He had fallen from space, abandoning the dying ship. Nothing could survive aboard her any more - with the threat of an engine detonation it would have been too hazardous even to remain in stasis. From what I could gather from his memory, it was not possible to land or take a shuttle.’

Hesperus must still have been locked out of vital control functions, even after the ship had brought him all the way here. Since she could not have been homing in on the Gentian signal, I could only presume that
Silver Wings
had steered towards the first hint of intelligent activity she found - the Platonic model solar system, with its strangely occluded star.

‘Did he bring Purslane with him?’

‘I’ll show you the robot, shatterling - you may find it of interest. It won’t take a moment - he’s down in the jungle, at the base of this plateau.’ The glass man beckoned out across the edge of the plateau. ‘Step off.’

‘What?’

‘Unless you can think of another way to get down there. I wouldn’t look to your ship - she would never fit. Don’t worry - I’ll be there to catch you.’

‘I only have your word for that.’

‘Yes,’ the glass man said, ‘that’s rather the point. There’s going to have to be a lot more trust from this time forward. Why don’t we start as we mean to go on?’

I closed my eyes. It occurred to me that perhaps this was the punishment ; that the First Machines had left behind the glass man to torment just one member of the human species, enacting their vengeance on me alone, rather than the rest of the meta-civilisation.

But, like Hesperus had said: revenge was for biologicals. Machines did things differently.

I stepped off.

There was a moment of weightlessness, time enough for me to begin to think that I had indeed been tricked. Then the pieces of the glass man caught up with my falling figure and supported me, just as the Spirit of the Air had supported me when we visited it on Neume. Marbles pressed under my arms, under the curve of my back, under my legs.

I was lowered through mist, towards the roaring cataract and into the green-canopied gloom of the jungle. There was life there but no animal life; nothing with a mind or a mouth. The forest was silent except for the swish of leaf on leaf, the creaking of old tree trunks and the static hiss of falling water, like the radio simmer of a million quasars. Still being buoyed aloft, we came to a clearing near the base of the cliff. The mist was a white ceiling that occasionally thinned out to reveal bluer sky or the sheer edifice of the plateau.

I landed softly. The clearing was floored with something like grass, thick-bladed and damp with condensation. Grass was universal, even in Andromeda. The clearing was empty except for a glass sphere three metres across, with a golden form suspended inside.

‘He’s still in stasis,’ the glass man said as he gathered his pieces back into human form. ‘He’s been here seventeen and a half thousand years, but he’s experienced less than six days of subjective time.’

‘Where’s the apparatus? I don’t see any stasis-generating machinery.’

‘You wouldn’t,’ the glass man said. He raised a hand and made the stasis bubble collapse, the barely recognisable form of Hesperus lowering slowly to the grass, on his back. ‘There’s a much simpler way of slowing time. You’ll work it out eventually, and then wonder what all the fuss was about.’

Hesperus’s body was in a bad way. The gold armour was fused and blackened, as if he had been melted and then allowed to cool again. In places it was leathery, cracked like an old painting; in others it was as glassy as amber. He was larger than I remembered - less like a gold man than a gold sarcophagus in the shape of a man. His arms were fused with the sides of his body, his legs joined together into a single mass. His head, which was swollen, showed no indications of life. His features had been melted together, leaving only a half-formed approximation of a human face. His eyes were gone. The dark windows of his skull were scorched, but I could see no lights moving beyond them.

‘You already told me he was gone,’ I said. ‘You told me he was dead, that there was nothing left of his personality.’

‘That’s still true.’

‘So why did you put him into stasis?’

‘Because of what he contained. I told you that he sacrificed his higher functions, discarding much of his own personality. He did that for a reason. He had to make room inside himself, to protect the thing he cared for most.’ The glass man nodded at my thoughts, as if they were transparent to him. ‘He became armour, Campion - altered himself so that he could protect Purslane during the fall to earth. Deciding to protect her would have been one of his last conscious acts as a fully formed sentience.’

I had felt strong until then, but now I fell to my knees, next to the golden form.

‘She’s inside him?’

‘There is a female human within the armour. The human is alive, albeit in a state of coma. I am no expert in these matters, but I believe the human to be unharmed. Of course, it may not be Purslane, but given the weight of evidence ...’

I closed my eyes, sobbing with the force of the unseen cataract, all my worst fears draining out of me in a silvery rush. ‘I have to get the armour off,’ I said, when I could speak again. I was racked by remorse for Hesperus, racked by desperate, intoxicating gratitude for the cargo he had kept safe.

‘Then I’ll help you,’ the glass man said as my fingers dug their useless nails into the fused seams of that golden mask. ‘After which, with regret, I shall have to be on my way.’