Chasm City

THIRTY-SIX

While Ratko was leading us towards Gideon I allowed the next episode to happen. That was how it seemed, anyway: that now it was up to me when it happened, as if it were simply a case of digging through three-hundred-year-old memories, sorting them into something like chronological order and letting the next lot flood my mind. There was nothing jarringly unfamiliar about it any more. It was as if I half knew exactly what was going to happen, but just hadn’t given the matter much recent thought, like a book I hadn’t opened in a long time, but whose story could never completely surprise me.

Sky and Norquinco were climbing down from the shaft where they had emerged, negotiating the chamber’s slippery, scalloped sides until they were standing near the shore of the red lake.

The maggot which rested in the lake, tens of metres away, had just introduced itself as Lago.

Sky steeled himself. He felt a tremendous sense of fear and strangeness, but he was convinced that it was his destiny to survive this place.

“Lago?” he said. “I don’t know. From what I gather, Lago was a man.”

“I’m also that which existed before Lago.” The voice, though loud, was calm and strangely lacking in menace. “This is difficult to say through Lago’s language. I am Lago, but I am also Travelling Fearlessly.”

“What happened to Lago?”

“That’s also not easy. Excuse me.” There was a pause while gallons of red fluid gushed out of the maggot into the lake, and then gallons more flowed up into the maggot. “That’s better. Much better. Let me explain. Before Lago there was just Travelling Fearlessly, and Travelling Fearlessly’s helper grubs, and the void warren.” The tendrils seemed to point out the cavern’s sides and ceiling. “But then the void warren was damaged, and many poor helper grubs had to be… there isn’t any word in Lago’s mind for this. Broken down? Dissolved? Degraded? But not lost fully.”

Sky looked at Norquinco, who had not said a word since entering the chamber. “What happened before your ship was damaged?”

“Yes—ship. That’s it. Not void warren. Ship. Much better.” The mouth smiled horribly and more red fluid rained out of the creature. “It’s a long time ago.”

“Start at the beginning. Why were you following us?”

“Us?”

“The Flotilla. The five other ships. Five other void warrens.” Despite his fear, he felt anger. “Christ, it’s not that difficult.” Sky held up his fist and opened his fingers one at a time. “One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Understand? Five. There were five other void warrens, built by us—by people like Lago—and you chose to follow us. I’d like to know why.”

“That was before the damage. After the damage, there were only four other void warrens.”

Sky nodded. So it understood something of what had happened to the Islamabad, anyway. “Meaning you don’t remember it as well?”

“Not very well, no.”

“Well, do your best. Where did you come from? What made you latch onto our Flotilla?”

“There’ve been too many voids. Too many for Travelling Fearlessly to remember all the way back.”

“You don’t have to remember all the way back. Just tell me how you got where you did.”

“There was a time when there were just grubs, even though there had been many voids. We looked for other types of grub but didn’t find any.” Meaning, Sky assumed, that there had been a time when Travelling Fearlessly’s people had crossed space, but not encountered any other form of intelligence.

“How long ago was this?”

“Ages ago. One and a half turns.”

Sky felt a chill of cosmic awe. Perhaps he was wrong, but he strongly suspected that the maggot was talking about rotations of the Milky Way; the time taken for a typical star at the current distance from the galactic centre to make one complete orbit. Each of those orbits would take more than two hundred million years… meaning that the grub’s racial memory—if that was what it was—encompassed more than three hundred million years of space travel. The dinosaurs had not even been a sketch on the evolutionary drawing board three hundred million years ago. It was a span of time that made humans, and everything humans had done, seem like a layer of dust on the summit of a mountain.

“Tell me the rest.”

“Then we did find other grubs. But they weren’t like us. Not like grubs at all, really. They didn’t want to… tolerate us. They were like a void warren but… empty. Just the void warren.”

A ship with no living things aboard it.

“Machine intelligences?”

The mouth smiled again. It was quite obscene, really. “Yes. Machine intelligences. Hungry machines. Machines that eat grubs. Machines that eat us.”

Machines that eat us.

I thought of the way the maggot had said that; as if all it amounted to was a mildly irritating aspect of reality; something that had to be endured but which could not really be blamed upon anyone. I remembered my revulsion at the thought of the maggot’s defeatist mode of thinking.

No—not my revulsion, I told myself. Sky Haussmann’s.

I was right—wasn’t I?

Ratko led the three of us through the crudely excavated tunnels of the Dream Fuel factory. Now and then we passed through widened chambers, dimly lit, where workers in glossy grey coats leaned over benches so densely covered with chemical equipment that they resembled miniature glass cities. There were enormous retorts filled with litres of dark, twinkling blood-red Dream Fuel. At the very end of the production line, neat racks of filled vials waited ready for distribution. Many of the workers had goggles like those worn by Ratko, specialised lenses clicking and whirring into place for each task in the production process.

“Where are you taking us?” I said.

“You wanted a drink, didn’t you?”

Quirrenbach whispered, “He’s taking us to see the man, I think. The man runs all this, so don’t underestimate him—even if he does have quite an unusual belief system.”

“Gideon?” Zebra asked.

“Well, that’s part of it,” Ratko said, obviously misunderstanding her.

We passed through another series of production labs, and then were led into a rough-walled office where a wizened old man lay—or sat, it wasn’t immediately clear—before an enormous, battered metal desk. The man was in a kind of wheelchair: a brutish, black, armoured contraption which was simmering gently, steam whispering out of leaking valves. Feedlines reached from the chair back into the wall. Presumably it could be decoupled from them when he needed to move around, gliding on the skeletal, curved-spoke wheels from which his chair was suspended.

The man’s body was hard to make out under its layers of aluminised blanketing. Two exquisitely bony arms emerged, the left placed across his thigh, the right toying with the army of black control levers and buttons set into one arm of the chair.

“Hello,” Zebra said. “You must be the man.”

He looked at each of us in turn. The man’s face was skin draped over bone, worn almost parchment-thin in places, so that he had a strangely translucent quality to him. But there was still an aura of handsomeness to him, and his eyes, when they finally looked in my direction, were like two piercing chips of interstellar ice. His jaw was strong, set almost contemptuously. His lips quivered as if he were on the verge of replying.

Instead, his right hand moved across the array of controls, depressing levers and pushing buttons with a dexterity that surprised me. His fingers, though they were thin, looked as strong and dangerous as the talons of a vulture.

He lifted his hand from the levers. Something started happening inside the chair, a rapid noisy clatter of mechanical switches. When the clatter stopped the chair began to speak, synthesising his words with a series of chime-like whistles which—if you concentrated—could be understood.

“Self-evidently. What can I do for you?”

I stared at him in wonder. I had been assuming that Gideon would be many things, but I had never imagined anything like this.

“You can fix us the drinks Ratko promised,” I said.

The man nodded—the movement was economical, to say the least—and Ratko went to a cup-board set into a rocky niche in one corner of the office. He came back with two glasses of water. I drank mine in one gulp. It didn’t taste too bad, considering it had probably been steam only a little while earlier. Ratko offered something to Zebra and she accepted with clear misgivings, thirst obviously suppressing concerns that we might be poisoned. I put the empty glass down on his battered metal desk.

“You’re not quite what I was expecting, Gideon.”

Quirrenbach nudged me. “This isn’t Gideon, Tanner. This is, well…” and then he trailed off before adding weakly, “The man, like I said.”

The man punched a new set of orders into the chair. There was more clattering—it went on for about fifteen seconds—before the voice began to pipe out again, “No, I’m not Gideon. But you’ve probably heard of me. I made this place.”

“What,” said Zebra. “This maze of tunnels?”

“No,” he said, after another pause while the chair processed the words. “No. Not this maze of tunnels. This whole city. This whole planet.” He had programmed a pause at that point. “I am Marco Ferris.”

I remembered what Quirrenbach had just told me about the man having an unusual belief system. Well, this certainly fitted the bill. But I couldn’t help but feel some sneaking empathy with the man in the steam-driven wheelchair.

After all, I wasn’t exactly sure who I was any more.

“Well, Marco,” I said. “Answer a question for me. Are you running this place, or is Gideon in charge? In fact, does Gideon even exist?”

The chair cluttered and clacked. “Oh, I am definitely running this place, Mister…” He dismissed my name with a minute wave of his other hand; too much trouble to stop mid-sentence and query me. “But Gideon is here. Gideon has always been here. Without Gideon, I would not be here.”

“Well, why don’t you take us to see him?” Zebra said.

“Because there is no need. Because no one gets to see Gideon without excellent reason. You do all your business through me, so why involve Gideon? Gideon is just the supplier. He doesn’t know anything.”

“We’d still like a word with him,” I said.

“I’m sorry. Not possible. Not possible at all.” He backed the chair away from the desk, the huge curved-spoke wheels rumbling on the floor.

“I still want to see Gideon.”

“Hey,” said Ratko, stepping forward to interpose between myself and the man who thought he was Marco Ferris. “You heard the man, didn’t you?”

Ratko moved, but he was an amateur. I dropped him, leaving him moaning on the floor with a fractured forearm. I motioned to Zebra to lean down and help herself to the gun Ratko had been about to pull. Now we were both armed. I pulled out my own weapon, while Zebra aimed the other gun at Ferris, or whoever the man really was.

“Here’s the deal,” I said. “Take me to Gideon. Or take me to Gideon weeping in agony. How does that sound?”

He pushed and tugged at another set of controls, causing the chair to unplug itself from its steam feedlines. I suppose there could have been weapons set into the chair, but I didn’t think they would be fast enough to do him much good.

“This way,” Ferris said, after another, briefer period of clattering.

He took us along more tunnels, spiralling downwards again. The chair propelled itself along with a series of rapid puffs, Ferris steering it expertly through narrow chicanes of rock. I wondered about him. Quirrenbach—and perhaps Zebra—appeared to accept that he was delusional. But then if he wasn’t who he claimed, who was he?

“Tell me how you got here,” I said. “And tell me what it has to do with Gideon.”

More clattering. “That’s a long story. Luckily it’s one I’ve often been asked to recount. That’s why I have this pre-programmed statement ready.”

The chair clattered some more and then the voice recommenced: “I was born on Yellowstone, created in a steel womb and raised by robots. That was before we could transport living people from star to star. You had to be grown from a frozen egg cell; coaxed to life by robots that had already arrived.” Ferris had been one of the Amerikanos; that much I knew already. That period was such a long time ago—before even Sky Haussmann’s time—that, in my mind at least, it had begun to blend into a general historical background of sailing ships, conquistadors, concentration camps and black plagues.

“We found the chasm,” Ferris told me. “That was the odd thing. No one had seen it from Earth’s system, even with the best instruments. It was too small a feature. But as soon as we started exploring our world, there it was. A deep hole in the planet’s crust, belching heat and a mixture of gases we could begin to process for air.

“It made very little sense, geologically. Oh, I’ve seen the theories—how Yellowstone must have been tidally stressed by an encounter with the gas giant in the distant past, and how all that heat energy in her core has to percolate to the surface, escaping through vents like the chasm. And perhaps there’s some truth in that, though it can’t be the whole story. It doesn’t explain the strangeness of the chasm; why the gases are so different to the rest of the atmosphere: warmer, wetter, several degrees less toxic. It was almost like a calling card. That, in fact, is exactly what it was. I should know. I went down into it to see what was at the bottom.”

He had gone in with one of the atmospheric explorers, spiralling deeper and deeper into the chasm until he was well below the mist layer. Radar kept him from smashing into the sides, but it was still hazardous, and at some point his single-seat craft had suffered a power lapse, causing it to sink even deeper. Eventually he had bottomed out, thirty kilometres beneath the surface. His ship had landed on a layer of lightly packed rubble which filled the entire floor of the chasm. Automated repair processes had kicked in, but it would take tens of hours before the ship could carry him back up to the surface.

With nothing better to do, Ferris had donned one of the atmosphere suits—designed to cope with extremes of pressure, temperature and chemistry—and had begun exploring the layer of rubble. He called it the scree. The warm, wet, oxygen-rich air was steaming up through the gaps in the rocks.

Ferris scrambled down, finding a route through the rubble. It was perilously hot, and he could have fallen to his death many times, but he managed to keep his footing and negotiate a route which took him down hundreds of metres. The rubble pressed down on the layers below, but there were always gaps he could squeeze through; places where he could anchor pitons and lines. The thought of dying was with him always, but it was only ever an abstract thing. None of the first-born Amerikanos had ever had to understand death; they’d never had to watch people grow older than themselves and die. It was something that they did not grasp on a visceral level.

Which was good. Because if Ferris had understood the risks a little better, and understood exactly what death entailed, he probably would not have gone as deeply into the scree as he had.

And he would never have found Gideon.

They must have expanded through space until they met another species, Sky thought—some kind of robot or cyborg intelligence.

Gradually, tediously, he got something resembling a coherent story out of Travelling Fearlessly. The grubs had been a peaceable, innocent starfaring culture for many millions of years until they had run into the machines. The grubs had expanded into space for arcane reasons of their own which Travelling Fearlessly was not able to explain, except to convey that they had little to do with curiosity or a need for resources. It seemed to be simply what grubs did; an imperative which had been hardwired into them in evolutionary antiquity. They had no overwhelming interest in technology or science for their own sakes, seeming to get by on techniques they had acquired so long ago in racial memory terms that the underlying principles had been forgotten.

Predictably, they had not fared well when their outlying colonies had encountered the grub-eating machines. The grub-eaters began to make slow incursions into grub space, pressuring the aliens to modify behaviour patterns that had been locked rigid for tens of millions of years. To survive, the grubs first had to grasp that they were being persecuted.

Even that took a million years to sink in.

Then, with glacial slowness, they began, if not to fight back, then at the very least to develop survival strategies. They abandoned their surface colonies and evacuated themselves entirely into interstellar space, the better to hide from the grub-eaters. They constructed void warrens as large as small planets. By and by they encountered the harried remnants of other species who were also being persecuted by the eaters, though they had a different name for them. The grubs appropriated technologies as it suited their needs, usually without bothering to understand them. Control of gravity and inertia had come from a symbiotic race called the Nestbuilders. A form of instantaneous communication had been bequeathed by a culture who called themselves the Jumper Clowns. The grubs had been sternly admonished when they had asked if the same principles might be extended to instantaneous travel. To the Jumper Clowns there was a fine, blasphemous line between faster-than-light signalling and travel. The one was acceptable within tightly specified parameters of usage. The other was an unspeakable perversion; a concept so distasteful that it caused refined Jumper Clowns to shrivel up and die in revulsion.

Only the most uncouth of young species failed to grasp this.

But for all the technologies that the grubs and their loose allies held, it was never enough to beat the machines. They were always swifter; always stronger. Now and then there were organic victories, but the general drift of things was always such that the grub-eaters would win.

Sky was thinking about that when Gomez called him again. The urgency in his voice was obvious despite the weakness of the signal.

“Sky. Bad news. The two shuttles have launched a pair of drones. They might just be cameras, but my guess is they’ll have anti-collision warheads on them. They’re on high-gee trajectories and they’ll reach us in about fifteen minutes.”

“They wouldn’t do it,” Norquinco said. “They wouldn’t attack us without first finding out what’s going on here. They’d run the risk of destroying a whole Flotilla ship which has, um, survivors and supplies on it, just like we thought it would have.”

“No,” Sky said. “They’d do it—if only to stop us getting hold of whatever they think’s on her.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Why not? It’s exactly what I’d do.”

He told Gomez to sit tight and killed the link. The fraction of a day he had imagined they would have to themselves had now compressed down to less than a quarter of an hour. It was probably not enough time to make it back to the shuttle and get away, even if there had been no obstructions to cut through. But there was still time to do something. Time, in fact, to hear the rest of what Travelling Fearlessly had to say. It might make all the difference. Trying not to think of the minutes ticking away, and the missiles haring closer, he told the grub to continue his story.

The grub was happy to oblige.

“Gideon,” the man in the chair said, after he had curtailed the telling of his story with an abrupt sequence of commands.

We had arrived in a natural cavern, high up on one side of a concave rock face. There was a ledge here, large enough to accommodate the wheelchair. I thought of pushing Ferris over the edge, but there was a sturdy-looking safety rail, uninterrupted except for a point where it allowed entrance to a caged spiral staircase that led all the way down to the chamber’s floor.

“Fuck,” Quirrenbach said, looking over the edge.

“You’re getting the hang of it,” I said.

I would have been as shocked as Quirrenbach, I suppose—except that I’d been forewarned by what Sky had found inside the Caleuche. There was another maggot down there—bigger even than the one Sky had seen, I thought—but it was alone; there were no helper grubs with it.

“This wasn’t quite what I was expecting,” Zebra said.

“It’s not what anyone’s ever expecting,” the man in the chair said.

“Someone please tell me what the tuck that thing is,” Quirrenbach said, like someone hanging very grimly onto the last tattered shred of sanity.

“Much what it looks like,” I said. “A large alien creature. Intelligent, too, in its own special way. They call themselves the grubs.”

Quirrenbach spoke through clenched jaw, the words emerging one at a time. “How. Do. You. Know.”

“Because I had the pleasure of meeting one before.”

“When?” Zebra asked.

“A long, long time ago.”

Quirrenbach sounded like a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown. “You’re losing me, Tanner.”

“Believe me, I’m not quite sure I believe it all myself.” I nodded at Ferris. “You and him—the maggot—you have quite a relationship going, don’t you?”

The chair clattered. “It’s really rather simple. Gideon gives us something we need. I keep Gideon alive. What could be fairer than that?”

“You torture it.”

“Sometimes he needs encouragement, that’s all.”

I looked down at the maggot again. It rested in a metal enclosure, a steep-sided bath that was knee-deep in brackish dark fluid, like squid ink. He was chained in place, and all around him loomed scaffolding and catwalks. Obscure, industrial-looking machines waited on gantries to be moved over the maggot. Electrical cables and fluid lines plunged into him at various points along his length.

“Where did you find him?” Zebra said.

“Here, as it happens,” Ferris told her. “He was inside the remains of a ship. It had crashed here, at the base of the chasm, maybe a million years ago. A million years. But that’s nothing to him. Though damaged and incapable of flight, the ship had kept him alive, in semi-hibernation, for all that time.”

“It just crashed here?” I said.

“There was more to it than that. It was running away from something. What, I’ve never really found out.”

I interrupted the sequence of sounds emanating from the chair. “Let me guess. A race of sentient, killer machines. They’d been attacking his race—and others—for millions of years themselves; harrying them from star to star. Eventually the grubs were pushed back into interstellar space, cowering away from starlight. But something must have driven this one here—a spying mission or something.”

He punched a new statement into the chair, which piped, “How would you know all this?”

“Like I just told Quirrenbach: me and the maggots go back a long, long way.”

I retrieved Sky’s memory of what his grub had told him. The fugitive species learned that to survive at all they had to hide, and hide expertly. There were pockets of space where intelligence had not arisen in recent times—sterilised by supernova explosions, or neutron star mergers—and these cleansed zones made the best hiding places. But there were dangers. Intelligence was always waiting to emerge; new cultures were always evolving and spilling into space. It was these out-breaks of life which drew the predatory machines. They placed automated watching devices and traps around promising solar systems, ready to be triggered as soon as new spacefaring cultures stumbled upon them. So the grubs and their allies—the few that remained—grew intensely paranoid and watchful for the signs of new life.

The grubs had never really paid much attention to Earth’s system. Curiosity was still something that required an effort of will for them, and it was not until the signs of intelligence around Earth became blatant that the grubs forced themselves to become interested. They watched and waited to see if the humans would make any forays into interstellar space, and for centuries, and then thousands of years, nothing happened.

But then something did happen, and it was not auspicious.

What Ferris had learned from Gideon dovetailed exactly with what Sky had learned aboard the Caleuche. Ferris’s grub had been chased for hundreds of light years—across centuries of time—by a single pursuing enemy. The enemy machine moved faster than the grub ship, able to make sharper turns and steeper decelerations. The enemy made the grubs’ mastery of momentum and inertia look hamfisted in the extreme. Yet, fast and strong as the killing machines were, they had limitations—it might have been more accurate to call them blindspots—which the grubs had carefully documented over the millennia. Their techniques of gravitational sensing were surprisingly crude for such other-wise efficient killers. Grub vessels had sometimes survived attacks by hiding themselves near—or within—larger camouflaging masses.

Finding the yellow world, with the killing machine closing on him fast, Gideon had seen his chance. He had located the deep geologic feature with an emotion as close to blessed joy as his neurophysiology allowed.

On the approach, the enemy had engaged him with long-range weapons. But the grub had hidden his ship behind the planet’s moon, the salvo of antimatter slugs gouging a chain of craters across the moon’s surface. The grub had waited until the moon’s position allowed him to make a rapid, unseen descent into the atmosphere and then into the chasm, the potential hideaway he had already scouted from space. He had enlarged and deepened it with his own weapons, burrowing further and further into the world’s crust. Fortunately, the thick, poisonous atmosphere camouflaged most of his efforts. But on the way in he had made a terrible error, brushing the sheer walls with his projected skein of armouring force. A billion tonnes of rubble had come crashing down, entombing him when he had meant only to hide until the killing machine moved on to seek another target. He had expected to wait perhaps a thousand years, at the longest—an eyeblink in grub terms.

It had been considerably longer than that before anyone came.

“He must have wanted you to find him,” I said.

Ferris answered, “Yes. By then he figured the enemy must have moved on. He was using the ship to signal his presence, altering the ratios of gases in the chasm. Warming them, too. He was sending out other signals too—exotic radiation. But we didn’t even detect that.”

“I don’t think the other grubs did either.”

“For a long time, I think they kept in touch. I found something in his ship—something that didn’t seem to be part of it, intact where all else showed signs of great antiquity and loss of function. It was like a glittering dandelion ball about a metre wide, just floating in its own chamber, suspended in a cradle of force. Quite beautiful and mesmerising to look at.”

“What was it?” Zebra asked.

He had anticipated her question. “I tried to find out for myself, but the results I got—based on the extremely crude and limited tests I was capable of running—were contradictory; paradoxical. The thing seemed to be astonishingly dense; capable of stopping solar neutrinos dead in their tracks. The way it distorted light-rays around itself suggested the presence of an immense gravitational field—yet there was nothing. It simply floated there. You could almost reach out and touch it, except that there was a barrier all around it that made your fingers tingle.” All the while that he had been speaking, Ferris had been entering another sequence of commands into his chair, his fingers moving with the effortless speed of an arpeggiating pianist. “I did eventually learn what it was, of course, but only by persuading the grub to tell me.”

“Persuasion?” I said.

“He has what we may think of as pain receptors, and regions of his nervous system that produce emotional reactions analogous to fear and panic. It was only a matter of locating them.”

“So what was it?” Zebra asked.

“A communicational device, but a very singular one.”

“Faster than light?”

“Not quite,” he answered me, after the usual pause. “Certainly not in the sense that you’d recognise it. It doesn’t transmit or receive information at all. It—and its brethren aboard other grub vessels—don’t need to. They already contain all the information which ever would have been received.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.

“Then let me rephrase what I’ve just said,” Ferris said, who must have had a reply already queued up. “Each and every one of their communicational devices already contains every message that would ever need to be communicated to the vessel in question. The messages are locked inside it, but are inaccessible until the scheduled moment of release. Somewhat in the manner of sealed orders on an old-time sailing ship.”

“I still don’t follow,” I said.

Zebra nodded. “Me neither.”

“Listen.” The man—with what must have been considerable expenditure of effort—leaned for-ward in his seat. “It’s really very simple. The grubs retain a record of every message they would have sent, across all their racial history. Then, deep in their future—deep in what is still our future—they merge the records into something. What, I’ve never really understood—just that it’s some kind of hidden machinery distributed throughout the galaxy. I confess the details have always eluded me. Only the name is clear, and even then the translation is probably no more than approximate.” He paused, eyeing us all with his peculiarly cold eyes. “Galactic Final Memory. It is—or will be—some kind of vast, living archive. It exists now, I think, only in partial form: a mere skeleton of what it will be, millions or billions of years from now. The point, nonetheless, is simple. The archive—whatever it is—transcends time. It keeps in touch with all the past and future versions of itself, down to the present epoch and deeper into our past. It’s constantly shuffling data up and down, running endless iterations. And the grubs’ communicational device is, as near as I understand it, a chip off the old block. A tiny fragment of the archive, carrying only time-tagged messages between the grubs and a handful of allied species.”

“What’s to stop the grubs reading messages earlier than they were sent, and figuring out how to avoid future events?”

Again, Ferris had seen that one coming. “They can’t. The device’s messages are all encoded—without the key, you can’t get at them. That’s the clever part. The key itself, so far as the grub under-stood it, would appear to be the instantaneous gravitational background radiation of the universe. When the grubs put a message into the communicational device—this is how they store them, as well—the device senses the gravitational heartbeat of the universe—the ticks of pulsars spiralling towards each other; the low moans of distant black holes devouring stars at the hearts of galaxies. It hears them all, and creates a unique signature: a key with which it encrypts the incoming message. Every device carries those messages, but they can’t be read out until the device satisfies itself that the gravitational background is the same. Or nearly the same—it has to allow for the spatial position of the message recipient, of course. That gives the devices an effective range of a few thousand light-years, apparently—once they get separated beyond that distance, they just don’t recognise the background signature as being correct any more. And any attempt to fake that back-ground, to try and predict what the future gravitational signature of the universe will be like, based on the known contributions—well, it never seems to work. The devices just fold up and die, apparently.”

For centuries, then, the grub must have been able to keep in some kind of contact with its remote allies. Then it had begun to approach the message-store limit of its own communicational device and had begun to transmit only sparingly. The enemy, it was said, had access to those messages as well—their own copies of the devices—so there was always a danger in using them. The creature had imagined that it had been lonely before, when it was being chased, but now it began to under-stand that it had never really known solitude. Solitude was a hard crushing force, akin to the mountains of rock above it. Yet it had stayed sane, allowing itself to talk to its allies every few tens of years, maintaining a fragile sense of kinship, that it still played a small role in the greater arena of grub affairs.

But Ferris had removed the grub from its ship, severing it with the communicational device. That must have been the start of the creature’s true descent into grub madness. “You milk it, don’t you?” I said. “Milk it for Dream Fuel. And more than that. You use its terror and loneliness. You distil those impressions and sell them.”

Ferris piped, “We’ve got probes sunk into his brain, reading his neural patterns. Run them through some software up in the Rust Belt, and we get to distil it into something a human can just about handle.”

“What’s he talking about?” Zebra asked.

“Experientials,” I said. “The black kind, with a small maggot motif near the top. I tried one, as a matter of fact. I didn’t know quite what to expect.”

“I’ve heard of them,” Zebra said. “But I’ve never tried one, and I wasn’t even sure they weren’t an urban myth.”

“No, they’re for real.” I remembered the welter of emotions that the experiential had fed into my brain, when I’d tried it aboard the Strelnikov. The predominant feelings had been of awful, crushing claustrophobia and fear—yet underpinned with the gut-churning sense that no matter how oppressive the claustrophobia was, it was preferable to the predator-haunted void beyond. I could still taste the terror that the experiential had instilled in me; subtly alien in flavour, yet recognisable for all that. At the time I’d had trouble understanding why people would pay to experience some-thing like that, but now it all made much more sense. It was all about extremes of experience; any-thing that would blunt boredom’s edge.

“What does he get for doing it?” Zebra asked.

“Relief,” said Ferris.

I saw what he meant. Down in the black slime which filled the tank, grey-suited workers were sloshing around with what looked like huge cattle-prods. They were knee-deep in the black stuff. Now and then one of them would run the tip of his prod across the grey side of the maggot, causing a shiver of pain to run along its blimplike length. Pale red stuff squirted out of pores in his mottled silvery skin. One of the workers moved to catch it in a flask.

At the other end, a high, shrill squeal sounded from his mouth parts.

“I guess he isn’t making Dream Fuel like he used to,” I said, feeling sickened. “What is it? Some kind of organic machinery?”

“I suppose so,” Ferris answered, managing to convey the minimum of interest as he did so. “He brought the Melding Plague here, after all.”

“Brought it?” Zebra said. “But he’s been here thousands of years.”

“Yes. And for all that time he was dormant, until we arrived, scurrying around on the surface with our pathetic little settlements and cities.”

“Did he know he had it?” I asked.

“I very much doubt it. The plague was probably something he carried without even knowing it; an old infection to which he had long since adapted. Dream Fuel might have been only slightly younger; a protection they evolved or engineered for themselves: a living stew of microscopic machines constantly secreted by their bodies. The machines were immune to the plague and held it in check, but they did much more than that. They healed and nourished their host, conveyed in-formation to and from his secondary grubs… eventually, I think, it became so much a part of them that they could no longer have lived without it.”

“But somehow the plague reached the city,” I said. “How long have you been down here, Ferris?”

“The better part of four interminable centuries, ever since I discovered him. The plague meant nothing to me, of course—I had nothing in me that it could harm. Conversely, his Dream Fuel—his very blood—kept me alive, without access to any other life-extension procedures.” He fingered the silver blanket over his frame. “Of course, the ageing process has not been totally arrested. Fuel is beneficial, but it is emphatically no miracle cure.”

I asked, “Then you’ve never seen Chasm City?”

“No—but I know what happened.” He looked hard at me; I felt my body temperature drop under the scrutiny of his gaze. “I prophesied it. I knew it would happen; that the city would turn monstrous and fill itself with demons and ghouls. I knew that our cleverest, swiftest and tiniest machines would turn against us; corrupting minds and flesh; bringing forth perversities and abominations. I knew there would come a time when we would have to turn to simpler machines; to older and cruder templates.” He raised a finger, accusingly. “All this I foresaw. Do you imagine that I engineered this chair in a mere seven years?”

At the other end of the maggot I saw a worker leaning from a catwalk with something that looked like a chain-saw. He was carving off a huge iridescent scab from the back of Gideon.

I looked at the mottled patch on my coat.

“That’s good, Ferris,” Zebra said. “You mind if I ask you one final question, before we get on our way?”

He punched his answer into the chair. “Yes?”

“Did you prophesy this?”

Then she took out her gun and shot him.

On the way back up I thought about what Ferris had shown me and what I had learned from Sky’s memories.

The grubs had observed a massive release of energy in the vicinity of the Earth system: five sparks of fire which bore the signature of matter-antimatter annihilation. Five void warrens being pushed up to a speed which would cause no indignation to the Jumper Clowns: a mere eight per cent of light. It was, nonetheless, quite an achievement considering that the primates had still been bashing each other around with bones only a million years earlier.

By the time the five human ships were noticed, the grubs had suffered terrible losses themselves. Their once mighty void warrens had been smashed and shattered by skirmishes with the enemy. In a period which the long-lived grubs looked back upon with sorrow, the warrens had been sundered; split into tinier, nimbler sub-warrens. The large grubs were social creatures and the sundering caused them immense pain, even though they were able to stay in limited contact with their siblings using the Jumper Clowns’ superluminal signalling system.

Eventually, one of the sub-warrens latched onto the five human ships. The sub-warren reshaped itself to match one of the ships it was following. Statistical analysis of ten million years of en-counters had shown that the tactic benefited the grubs in the long run, even though it could be disastrous in any single meeting.

Travelling Fearlessly’s plan was simple enough in grub terms. He would study the humans and decide what must be done about them. If they showed signs of expanding massively into this volume of space, creating the kind of disturbance which the eaters would find it hard to miss, then it might prove necessary to cull them. Amongst the surviving species, there were some which had taken it upon themselves to perform such painful-but-necessary cullings.

Travelling Fearlessly hoped that it would not come to that. He hoped that the humans would re-main a low-level nuisance that did not require immediate culling. If all they planned to do was settle one or two immediate solar systems, they could probably be left alone for now. Culling was itself an act which ran the risk of attracting eaters, so it was never to be performed unless there was excellent reason. As decades passed and the humans made no move, hostile or otherwise, Travelling Fearlessly moved the void warren closer and closer to the cluster of human ships. Perhaps the thing to do was make his presence known; establish dialogue with the humans and explain the awkward-ness of the situation. The grub had been working out how to make the first move when one of the ships had blown up.

The explosion was consistent with the complete detonation of several tonnes of antimatter. Travelling Fearlessly’s void warren had caught much of the blast, damaging the ship’s camouflage integument and killing many of the grubs who had been working near the skin. Their death agonies had reached Travelling Fearlessly through their secretions. He had absorbed what he could of their individual memories, even as the wounded helper grubs were dissolved back down into their organic constituents.

In pain, with half his memories lacerated, Travelling Fearlessly had moved the void warren away from the Flotilla.

But someone had noticed. Oliveira and Lago had arrived shortly afterwards, not really sure what to expect, half believing the old story of a ghost ship; a sixth original member of the Flotilla which had been expunged from history.

That, of course, was not what they had found.

Oliveira had sent Lago in first, to find the fuel they needed to get back, and Lago had quickly realised that he was not in any human ship. When the helper grubs had brought him to Travelling Fearlessly’s chamber, things had gone poorly. Travelling Fearlessly had only been trying to help the creature by pointing out that he did not need to use his spacesuit; that they both breathed the same air. But perhaps the way he had done this—by having helper grubs eat the man’s suit away—had, in hindsight, not been ideal. Lago had become upset and had begun to hurt the helper grubs with the cutting torch. As the fire burned the helpers, Travelling Fearlessly drank in their agonised secretions as if the pain was his own.

It was unpleasant, but he had no choice but to dismantle Lago. Lago, of course, hadn’t taken to that very enthusiastically either, but by then it was too late. The helper grubs had detached most of his extremities and the more interesting components from inside Lago, learning how the various bits of him worked and fitted together, before dissolving his central nervous system into the secretion. Travelling Fearlessly had ingested as many of Lago’s memories as he could make sense of. He had learned how to make the same kinds of sounds as Lago, and how to impart meaning to those sounds, and—copying Lago—he had made a mouth for himself. Other grubs had copied Lago’s sensory organs, or even incorporated bits of him into themselves.

Now, having come to a greater understanding, Travelling Fearlessly understood why Lago had not taken well to his first view of the maggot-ridden chamber. He felt sorry for what he had been forced to do to Lago and tried to make amends by using as much of Lago’s memory and component parts as he could.

He was sure the humans would appreciate this gesture.

“After Lago came, it was very lonely again,” the mouth said. “Much lonelier than before.”

“You didn’t grasp loneliness until you ate him, you fucking stupid maggot.”

“That is… possible.”

“All right—listen to me carefully. You’ve explained to me that you feel pain. Good. I needed to know that. You presumably have a well-developed instinct for self-preservation, too, or you wouldn’t have survived until now. Well, I have a harbourmaker with me. If you don’t understand the concept, look it up in Lago’s memory. I’m sure he knew.”

There was a pause while the maggot shifted uncomfortably; red fluid sloshing around like sea-water under a beached whale. Harbourmakers were nuclear warheads; equipment carried by the Flotilla to assist in the development of Journey’s End.

“I understand.”

“Good. Perhaps you can use that gravity trick to stop it from working, but I’m willing to bet that you can’t generate arbitrarily strong fields that easily, or you’d have used something similar to immobilise Lago when he started giving you difficulties.”

“I told you too much.”

“Yes, you probably did. But I still want to know more. About this ship, mainly. You were engaged in a war, weren’t you? You may not have been winning it, but my guess is you wouldn’t have survived until now without weapons of some description.”

“We don’t have weapons.” The grub’s mouth looked affronted. “Only armouring skein.”

“Armouring skein?” Sky thought about it for a few moments, trying to get his head into the grub’s mode of thinking. “Some kind of projected force technology, is that it? You can put up some kind of field around this ship?”

“We could, once. But the necessary parts were damaged when the fifth void warren was destroyed. Now only a partial skein can be created. It’s no use at all against an adept enemy like the grub eaters. They see the holes.”

“All right, listen to me. Do you sense the two small machines approaching us?”

“Yes. Are they also friends of Lago?”

“Not quite.” Well, the shuttle crews might be, he thought—but they were very unlikely to be friends of Sky Haussmann, and that was all that really mattered. “I want you to use your skein against those machines—or I use the harbourmaker against you. Is that clear?”

The grub seemed to understand. “You want me to destroy them?”

“Yes. Or I’ll destroy you.”

“You wouldn’t do that. It would kill you.”

“You don’t understand,” Sky said amicably. “I’m not Lago; I don’t think like him, and I certainly don’t act like him.”

He selected one of the nearer grubs and unloaded part of the machine-gun’s clip into the creature. The slugs punched thumb-sized holes in the creature’s pale-pink integument. He watched the red stuff drain out and then heard an awful shrill cry come from some part of the creature. Except he was wrong about that, now that he paid attention. The shrill cry was coming from the large grub; not the one that he had shot.

He watched the injured one collapse down into the sea of red, until only part of it was showing. Several other helper grubs undulated towards it and began to prod it with their feelers.

Gradually, the keening sound of anguish died down to a low moan.

“You hurt me.”

“I was just making a point,” Sky said. “When Lago hurt you, he hurt you indiscriminately because he was scared. I’m not scared. I hurt you because I want you to know exactly what I’m capable of.”

A couple of helper grubs were thrashing their way ashore only metres from where Sky and Norquinco were standing.

“No,” Sky said. “Don’t come any closer or I’ll shoot another one—and don’t try any funny tricks with gravity, or I’ll make the harbourmaker go off.”

The grubs halted, their fronds waving hysterically.

The yellow light—the light that bathed the whole chamber—died for a second. Sky was not expecting darkness. For an instant the terror of it was total. He had forgotten that the grubs controlled the light. In darkness, they could do almost anything. He imagined them emerging from the red lake, dragging him into it by his heels. He imagined being eaten by them, the way Lago had been. There might come a point where he could no longer tell the harbourmaker to go off; could no longer erase his own agony.

Perhaps he should do it now.

But the yellow light returned.

“I did as you asked,” Travelling Fearlessly said. “It was hard. It took all our power to push the skein out to that distance.”

“Did it work?”

“There are two more out there—smaller void warrens.”

The shuttles. “Yes. But they won’t be here for a little while. Then you can do the same trick again.” He called Gomez. “What happened?”

“The probes just blew up, Sky—like they’d hit something.”

“Nuclear?”

“No. They weren’t carrying harbourmakers.”

“Good. Stay where you are.”

“Sky—what the hell is going on inside there?”

“You don’t want to know, Gomez—you really don’t want to know.”

He had to strain to pick out the next question. “Did you find—what was his name? Lago?”

“Oh yes, we found Lago. Didn’t we, Lago?”

Now Norquinco was speaking. “Sky. Listen. We should go now. We don’t have to kill the other people. We don’t want to start a war between the ships.” He raised his voice, his helmet speaker booming out across the red lake. “You can protect us in other ways, can’t you? You could move us; move this whole ship—this whole void warren, to safety? Out of the range of the shuttles?”

“No,” Sky said. “I want those shuttles destroyed. If they want a war between the ships, they’ll get one. We’ll see how long they last.”

“For God’s sake, Sky.” Norquinco reached out to him, as if to grasp him. Sky stepped away and lost his footing on the chamber’s hard and slick surface. Suddenly he was toppling over; falling backwards into the red brine. He landed on his backpack, half submerged in the shallows. The red liquid sloshed across his faceplate with strange eagerness, as if seeking a way into his suit. Out of the corner of his eye he saw two helper grubs undulating towards him. Sky thrashed, but he could not get a grip on any surface to lift himself out, let alone stand up.

“Norquinco. Get me out.”

Norquinco moved cautiously to the edge of the red lake. “Maybe I should leave you there, Sky. Maybe that would be the best thing for all of us.”

“Get me out, you bastard.”

“I didn’t come here to do any evil, Sky. I came here to help the Santiago—and maybe the rest of the Flotilla.”

“I have the harbourmaker.”

“But I don’t think you have the courage to let it off.”

The grubs had reached him now—two and then a third he had not seen approaching. They were poking and prodding him with differently shaped clusters of appendages, exploring his suit. He thrashed, but the red fluid seemed to be thickening, conspiring to hold him prisoner.

“Get me out, Norquinco. That’s your last warning…”

Norquinco still stood over him, but he had not come any closer to the edge. “You’re sick, Sky. I’ve always suspected it, but I never saw it until now. I really don’t know what you’re capable of.”

Then something he had not been expecting happened. He had stopped thrashing because it was almost too much effort, and now he was being lifted out of the red fluid, the fluid itself seeming to elevate him, while the grubs pushed him gently. Shivering with fear, he found himself on the shore. The last traces of the red fluid raced off him.

For a moment, wordlessly, he stared at Travelling Fearlessly, knowing that the grub sensed his attention.

“You believe me, don’t you. You won’t kill me. You know what it would mean.”

“I don’t want to kill you,” Travelling Fearlessly said. “Because then I’d be lonely again, like I was before you came.”

He understood, and the understanding itself was vile. It still cherished his company even after he had inflicted pain on it; even after he had murdered part of it. The thing was so desperately lonely that it even desired the presence of its torturer. He thought of a small child screaming in absolute darkness, betrayed by a friend that had never properly existed, and—while at the same time hating it absolutely for its weakness—did at least understand.

And that made his hatred all the more intense.

He had to kill another grub before he persuaded Travelling Fearlessly to destroy the two approaching shuttles, and this time it was not just the murder of the grub that agonised the creature. Generating the skein seemed to pain it as well, as if the grub could sense the ship’s damage.

But by then it was over. He could have stayed; could have kept torturing the grub until it told him all it knew. He could have forced the grub to show him how the ship moved, and found out whether it was capable of taking them to Journey’s End quicker than the Santiago. He could even have considered bringing some of the Santiago’s crew here, aboard the void warren—living in its endless tunnels, forcing the grubs to adjust the air mix and temperature until it suited human tastes. How many could the alien ship have supported—dozens, or hundreds? Perhaps even the momios, if they were woken? Maybe some of them would have had to be fed to the helper grubs to keep them happy, but he could have lived with that.

But he decided, instead, to destroy the ship.

It was simpler by far; it freed him from negotiating with the grub; freed him from the sense of revulsion he felt when he recognised its loneliness. It also freed him from running the risk of the void warren ever falling into the hands of the other Flotilla vessels.

“Let us leave,” he told Travelling Fearlessly. “Clear a route right to the surface, near where we came in.” He heard sonorous clangs as passageways were rerouted; airlocks opening and shutting. A breeze caressed the red water. “You can leave now,” the grub told him. “I’m sorry that we had a disagreement. Will you come back soon?”

“Count on it,” Sky said.

Later, they pulled away in the shuttle. Gomez still had no idea what had happened; no idea why the approaching forces had simply blown up. “What did you find in there?” he asked. “Did anything that Oliveira said make sense, or was he just insane?”

“I think he was insane,” Sky said. Norquinco made no comment; they had barely spoken at all since the incident by the lake. Perhaps Norquinco thought it would slip from his memory if it was not remarked upon—an understandable lapse of nerve in a tense situation. But Sky kept replaying the fall in his mind; remembering the red tide fingering his faceplate; wondering how many molecules of it had actually slipped through.

“What about the medical supplies—did you find anything? And did you get any idea what happened to her hull?”

“We found out a few things,” Sky said. “Just get us away from here, will you? Max thrust.”

“But what about the propulsion section? I need to look at the containment; need to see if we can get that antimatter…”

“Just do it, Gomez.” He offered a comforting lie. “We’ll come back for the antimatter another time. She isn’t going anywhere.”

The void warren pulled away from them. Gomez looped them around to her intact side, then kicked in the shuttle’s thrusters. Once they had moved two or three hundred metres from her, it was impossible to tell that she was anything other than what she seemed to be. For a fleeting instant Sky thought of her again as the Caleuche: the ghost ship. They had been so wrong; so utterly wrong. But no one could blame them for that—the truth, after all, had been far stranger.

There would be trouble, of course, when they returned to the Flotilla. One of the other ships had sent their own shuttles here, which meant that Sky would probably face recrimination; perhaps even some kind of tribunal. But he had planned for that, knowing that, with shrewdness, he could use the moment to his advantage. The trail of evidence he had created with Norquinco’s help would, when revealed, point to Ramirez as having orchestrated the expedition to the Caleuche, with Constanza part of the conspiracy. Sky would be revealed as none other than an unwitting stooge of his Captain’s megalomaniac schemes. Ramirez would be removed from the captaincy; perhaps even executed. Constanza would certainly be punished. There would, needless to say, be very little doubt in anyone’s minds as to who should succeed Ramirez in the Captaincy.

Sky waited another minute or so, not daring to leave it longer than that in case Travelling Fearlessly suspected what was going to happen and tried to prevent it in some way. Then he made the harbourmaker go off. The nuclear flash was bright and clean and holy, and when the sphere of plasma had spread itself thin, like a flower whose bloom turned from blue-white to interstellar black, there was nothing left at all.

“What did you just do?” Gomez said.

Sky smiled. “Put something out of its misery.”

“I should have killed him,” Zebra said, as the inspection robot neared the surface.

“I know how it feels,” I said. “But we probably wouldn’t have been able to walk out if you had.” She had aimed for his body, but it had never been very obvious where Ferris ended and his wheel-chair began. Her shot had only damaged his support machinery. He had moaned, and when he’d tried to compose a sentence the inner workings of the chair had rattled and scraped before delivering a scrambled sequence of piped sounds. I suspected it would take a lot more than one ill-judged shot to kill a four-hundred-year-old man whose blood was almost certainly supersaturated with Dream Fuel.

“So what good did that little jaunt do?” she asked.

“I’ve been asking myself the same question,” Quirrenbach said. “All we know now is a little more about the means of production. Gideon’s still down there, and so’s Ferris. Nothing’s changed.”

“It will,” I said.

“Meaning what?”

“That was just a scouting expedition. When all this is over, I’m going back there.”

“He’ll be expecting us next time,” Zebra said. “We won’t be able to breeze in so easily.”

“We?” Quirrenbach said. “Then you’re already committed to this return trip, Taryn?”

“Yes. And do me a favour. Call me Zebra from now on, will you?”

“I’d listen to her if I were you, Quirrenbach.” I felt the inspection robot begin to tilt over back to the horizontal as we approached the chamber where I hoped Chanterelle would still be waiting. “And yes, we’re going back, and no, it won’t be so easy the second time.”

“What do you hope to achieve?”

“As someone close to me once said, there’s something down there that needs to be put out of its misery.”

“You’d kill Gideon, is that it?”

“Rather than live with the idea of it suffering, yes.”

“But the Dream Fuel…”

“The city will just have to learn to live without it. And whatever other services it owes to Gideon. You heard what Ferris said. The remains of Gideon’s ship are still down there, still altering the chemistry of the gases in the chasm.”

“But Gideon isn’t in the ship now,” Zebra said. “You don’t think he’s still influencing it, do you?”

“He’d better not be,” Quirrenbach said. “If you killed him, and the chasm stopped supplying the city with the resources it needs… can you honestly imagine what would happen?”

“Yes,” I said. “And it would probably make the plague look like a minor inconvenience. But I’d still do it.”

Chanterelle was waiting for us when we arrived. She opened the exit hatch nervously, studying us for a fraction of a second before deciding that we were the ones who had gone down. She put aside her weapon and helped us out, each groaning at the relief of no longer being inside the pipe. The air in the chamber was far from fresh, but I gulped in exultant lungfuls.

“Well?” Chanterelle said. “Was it worth it? Did you get close to Gideon?”

“Close enough.” I said.

Just then something buried in Zebra’s clothes began to chime, like a muffled bell. She handed me her gun and then fished out one of the clumsy, antique-looking phones which were the height of modernity in Chasm City. “Must have been trying to reach me the whole time we were coming up the tube,” she said, flipping open the viewscreen.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Pransky,” Zebra said, pushing the phone against her ear, while I told Chanterelle that the man was a private investigator who was peripherally involved in all that had happened since my arrival. Zebra spoke to him in a low voice, one hand cupped round her mouth to muffle the conversation. I couldn’t hear anything that Pransky was saying, and only a half of what Zebra said—but it was more than enough to get the gist of the conversation.

Someone, presumably one of Pransky’s contacts, had been murdered. Pransky was at the crime scene even as he spoke, and from the way Zebra was talking to him, he sounded agitated; like it was the last place in the world he wanted to be.

“Have you…” She was probably about to ask him if he’d alerted the authorities, before realising that where Pransky was, there was no such thing as law; even less than in the Canopy. “No, wait. No one has to know about this until we get there. Stay tight.” And with that, Zebra cuffed the phone shut, returning it to her pocket.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Someone’s killed her,” Zebra said.

Chanterelle looked at her. “Killed who?”

“The fat woman. Dominika. She’s history.”