Hideaway

PART FIVE

'I wanted you to be the first to know,' Sayaca said, her semblance standing regally in his quarters like a playing-card monarch. 'We've found signals coming from inside the planet. Gravitational signals - exactly what we'd expect if someone in the shadow universe was trying to contact us.'

Merlin studied the beautiful lines of her face, reminding himself that all he was speaking to was a cunning approximation of the real Sayaca, who was light-hours of communicational time-lag down-system.

'How do they do it? Get a signal across, I mean.'

'There's only one way: you have to move large masses around quickly, creating a high-frequency ripple in space-time. They're using black holes, I think: miniature ones, like the thing you first thought we'd found in Ghost. Charged up and oscillated, so that they give off an amplitude-modulated gravitational wave.'

Merlin shrugged. 'So it wasn't such a stupid idea to begin with.'

Sayaca smiled tolerantly. 'We still don't know how they make and manipulate them. But that doesn't matter for now. What does is that the message is clearly intended for us. It's only commenced since we reached into Cinder's deeper layers. Somehow that action alerted them - whoever they are - to our presence.'

Merlin shivered despite himself. 'Is there any chance that these signals could be picked up by the Huskers as well?'

'Every chance, I'd say - unless they stop before they get here. Which is why we've been working so hard to decode the signal.'

'And you have?'

Sayaca nodded. 'We identified recurrent patterns in the gravitational signal, a block of data that the shadow people were sending over and over again. Within this block of data were two kinds of bits: a strong gravitational pulse and a weaker one, like a one and zero in binary notation. The number of bits in the signal was equal to the product of three primes - definitely not accidental - so we reassembled the data-set along three axes, forming a three-dimensional image.' Sayaca paused and lifted her palm. What appeared in mid-air was a solid rectangular form, slab-sided and featureless. It rotated lazily, revealing its blankness to the audience.

'Doesn't look like much,' Merlin said.

'That's because the outer layer of the solid is all ones. In fact, only a tiny part of its volume is made up of zeroes at all. I'll remove the ones and display only the zero values . . .'

A touch of showmanship: the surface of the box suddenly seemed to be made out of interlocking birds, frozen in formation for an instant before flying in a million different directions. Suddenly what she was showing him made a lot more sense. It was like a ball of loosely knotted string. A map of Cinder's crustal tunnels, plunging more deeply towards the core than their own maps even hinted. Five or six hundred kilometres into the lithosphere.

'But it doesn't tell us anything we wouldn't have learned eventually--' Merlin said.

'No; I think it does.' Sayaca made the image enlarge, until she was showing him the deep end of one particular tunnel. It was capped by a nearly spherical chamber. 'All the other shafts end abruptly, even those that branch off from this one at higher levels. But they've clearly drawn our attention to this chamber. That has to mean something.'

'You think there's something there, don't you?'

'We'll know soon enough. By the time this semblance speaks to you, Gallinule and I will have almost reached that chamber. Wish us the best of luck, won't you? Whatever we find in there, I'm fairly certain it'll change things for us.'

'For better or for worse?'

The semblance smiled. 'We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?'

End times, Merlin thought again. He could taste it in the air: quiet desperation. The long-range sensors sprinkled around the system had picked up the first faint hints of neutrino emission, which might originate with Husker craft moving stealthily towards Bright Boy from interstellar space. And the main swarms up and down the length of the Way had not gone away.

One or two humans had undergone Gallinule's fatal scanning process now, choosing to go ahead of the pack rather than wait for the final stampede. Their patterns were frozen at the moment, but before very long Gallinule's acolytes would weave a simulated environment that the scanned could inhabit. Then, undoubtedly, others would follow. But not many. Merlin was not alone in flinching at the idea of throwing away the flesh just to survive. There were some prices that were simply too high, simply too alien.

Do that, he thought, and we're halfway to being Husker ourselves.

What could he do to save himself, if saving the rest of them was out of the question? He thought of stealing the syrinx. He had not learned enough to use it safely yet, but he knew he was not far from being able to do so. But it was tightly guarded, under permanent Council scrutiny. He had asked Gallinule and Sayaca to apply persuasion to the others, but while they might have had the necessary influence, they had not acceded to his wishes.

And now Sayaca was back from Cinder, bearing tidings. She had convened a meeting again, but this time nobody was going to steal her thunder.

Especially as she had brought someone with her.

It was the semblance of a woman: a female of uncertain age but from approximately the same genetic background as everyone present. That was nothing to be counted on; since the Flourishing there had been many splinters of humanity, many of which seemed monstrously strange to those who had remained loyal to the old phenotype. But had this woman changed her clothes, make-up and hairstyle, she could have walked amongst them without attracting a second glance. Except perhaps for her beauty: something indefinably serene in her face and bearing that seemed almost supernatural.

Her expression, before she began speaking, was one of complete calm.

'My name is Halvorsen,' she said. 'It's an old name, archaic even in my own time . . . I have no idea how it will sound to your ears, or if you can even understand a word of what I'm saying. We will record versions of this message in over a thousand languages, all that we hold in our current linguistics database, in the hope that some distant traveller will recognise something, anything, of use.'

Merlin raised a hand. 'Stop . . . stop her. Can you do that?'

Sayaca nodded, causing Halvorsen to freeze, mouth open.

'What is she?' Merlin said.

'Just a recording. We triggered her when we arrived in the chamber. It wasn't hard to translate her. We already knew that the Diggers' language would later evolve into Main, so it was just a question of hoping that one of the recordings would be in a tongue that was also in our records.'

'And?'

'Well, none of her messages were in languages we knew moderately well. But three were in languages for which we had fragments, so we were able to patch together this version using all three threads. There are still a few holes, of course, but I don't think we'll miss anything critical.'

'You'd better hope not. Well, let her - whoever she is - continue.'

Halvorsen became animated again. 'Let me say something about my past,' she said. 'It may help you establish the time frame in which this recording was made. My ancestors came from Earth. So did yours - if you are at all human - but in my case I even met someone who had been born there, although it was one of her oldest memories, something as faint and tiny as an image seen through the wrong end of a telescope. She remembered a time before the Flourishing, before the great migrations into the Orion Arm. We rode swallowships for ten thousand years, cleaving close to light-speed. Then came wars. Awful wars. We hid for another ten thousand years, until our part of the galaxy was quiet again. We watched many cultures rise and fall, learning what we could from them; trading with those who seemed the least hostile. Then the Waymakers came, extending their transit network into our region of space. They were like gods to us as well, although we stole some of their miracles and fashioned them to our own uses. After thousands of years of careful study we learned how to make syrinxes and to use the Waynet.' She paused. 'We had a name for ourselves too: the Watchers.'

Halvorsen's story continued. She told them how a virus had propagated through their fleets, subtly corrupting their most ancient data heirlooms. By the time the damage was discovered, all their starmaps had been rendered useless. They no longer knew where Earth was. At first, the loss seemed of minimal importance, but as time passed, and they came into contact with more and more cultures, it became clear that the Watchers' records had probably been the last to survive uncorrupted.

'That was when she died, the oldest of us. I think until then she had always clung to some hope that we would return to Earth. When she knew it could never happen, she saw no reason to continue living.'

Then they entered a long Dark Age. The Waymakers had gone; now, unpoliced, terrors were roaming the galaxy. Marauders sought the technological wisdom that the Watchers had acquired over slow millennia. The Watchers fled, pursued across the light-years in much the same manner as the Cohort now found itself, hounded from star to star. Like the Cohort too, they found Bright Boy. They were exploring it, trying to understand the system's anomalies; hoping that the understanding would bring new power over their enemies. They had excavated the tunnel system into Cinder and created the machines that lined the terminal chamber. They too had detected signals from the shadow universe, although the contents of the messages proved much harder to decode.

'They were alien,' Halvorsen said. 'Truly alien: automated transmissions left behind half a billion years earlier by a group of creatures who had crossed over into the shadow universe. They had been fleeing the fire that was about to be unleashed by the merger of a pair of binary neutron stars only a few hundred light-years away. They left instructions on how to join them. We learned how to generate the same kinds of high-frequency gravitational waves that they were using to signal us. Then we learned how to encode ourselves into those wave packets so that we could send biological information between universes. Although the aliens were long gone, they left behind machines to tend to us and to take care of our needs once we were reassembled on the other side.'

'But the Marauders are long gone,' Merlin said. 'Our oldest records barely mention them. Why didn't Halvorsen and her people return here?'

'There was no need,' Sayaca said. 'We tend to think of the shadow universe as a cold, ghostly place, but once you're mapped into it, it looks much like our own universe - the sky dotted with bright suns, warm worlds orbiting them. Theirs for the taking, in fact. Halvorsen's people had been late-players in a galaxy already carved up by thousands of earlier factions. But the shadow universe was virgin territory. They no longer had to skulk around higher powers, or hide from outlaw clades. There was no one else there.'

'Except the aliens . . . the--' Merlin blinked. 'What did she call them?'

Sayaca paused before answering. 'She didn't. But their name for them was the . . .' Again, a moment's hesitation. 'The Shadow Puppets. And they were long gone. They'd left behind machines to assist any future cultures who wanted to make the crossing, but there was no sign of them now. Maybe they moved away to settle some remote part of the shadow galaxy, or maybe they returned to our universe when the threat from the merger event had passed.'

'Halvorsen's people trusted these creatures?'

'What choice did they have? Not much more than us. They were in as much danger from the Marauders as we are from the Huskers.'

It was Halvorsen who continued the story. 'So we crossed over. We expanded massively; extended a human presence around a dozen nearby systems on the other side. Star travel's difficult because there's no Waynet, but the social templates we acquired during the time before the Marauders have served us well. We've been at peace for one thousand years at the time of this message's recording. Many more thousands of years are likely to have passed before it reaches you. If we attempted to communicate with you gravitationally, then you can be sure that we're still alive. By then we will have studied you via the automated systems we left running in Cinder. They will have told us that you are essentially peaceable; that we are ready to welcome you.'

Halvorsen's tone of voice changed now. 'That's our invitation, then. We've opened the gateway for you; provided the means for information to pass into the shadow universe. To take the next step, you must make the hardest of sacrifices. You must discard the flesh; submit yourselves to whatever scanning techniques you have developed. We did it once, and we know it's a difficult journey, but less difficult than death. For us, the choice was obvious enough. For you, it may not be so very different.' Halvorsen paused and extended a hand in supplication. 'Do not be frightened. Follow us. We have been waiting a long time for your company.'

Then she bowed her head and the recording halted.

Merlin could feel the almost palpable sense of relief sweeping the room, though no one was undignified enough to let it show. A swelling of hope, after so many months of staring oblivion in the face. Finally, there was a way out. A way to survive, which was something other than Gallinule's route to soulless immortality in computer memory. Even if it also meant dying . . . but it would only be a transient kind of death, as Halvorsen had said. Waiting for them on the other side was another world of the flesh, into which they would all be reborn.

A kind of promised land.

It would be very difficult to resist, especially when the Huskers arrived. But Merlin just stared hard at the woman called Halvorsen, certain that he knew the truth and that Sayaca had, on some level, wanted him to know it as well.

She was lying.

Tyrant fell towards empty space, in the general direction of the Way. When Merlin judged himself to be a safe distance from Cinder he issued the command that would trigger the twenty nova-mines emplaced in the lowermost chamber. He looked down on the world and nothing seemed to happen, no stammer of light from the exit holes of the Digger tunnel system. Perhaps some inscrutable layer of preservation had disarmed the nova-mines.

Then he saw the readouts from the seismic devices that Sayaca had dropped on the surface, what seemed like half a lifetime earlier. He had almost forgotten that they existed - but now he watched each register the detonation's volley of sound waves as they reached the surface. A few moments later, there was a much longer, lower signal - the endless roar of collapsing tunnels, like an avalanche. Some sections of the tunnels would undoubtedly remain intact, but it would be hard to cross between them. He was not yet done, though. First he directed missiles at the tunnel entrances, collapsing them, and then assigned smaller munitions to destroy Sayaca's seismic instruments, daubing the surface with nuclear fire.

There must be no evidence of human presence here; nothing to give the Huskers a clue as to what had happened--

That everyone was gone now: crossed over into the shadow universe. Sayaca, Gallinule, all the others. Everyone he knew, submitting to the quick, clean death of Gallinule's scanning apparatus. Biological patterns encoded into gravitational signals and squirted into the realm of shadow matter.

Except, of course, Merlin.

'How did you guess?' Sayaca had asked him, just after she had presented Halvorsen's message.

They had been alone, physically so, for the first time in months. 'Because you wanted me to know, Sayaca. Isn't that the way it happened? You had to deceive the others, but you wanted me to know the truth. Well, it worked. I guessed. And I have to admit, you and Gallinule did a very thorough job.'

'Do you want to know how much of it was true?'

'I suppose you're going to tell me anyway.'

Sayaca sighed. 'More of it than you'd probably have guessed. We did detect signals from the shadow universe, just as I said.'

'Just not quite the kind you told us.'

'No . . . no.' She paused. 'They were much more alien. Enormously harder to decode in the first place. But we managed it, and the content of the messages was more or less what I told the Council: a map of Cinder's interior, directing us deeper. There we encountered other messages. By then, we had become more adept at translating them. It wasn't long before we understood that they were a set of instructions for crossing over into the shadow universe.'

'But there was never any Halvorsen.'

Sayaca shook her head. 'Halvorsen was Gallinule's idea. We knew that crossing over was the only hope we had left, but no one would want to do it unless we could make the whole thing sound more, well . . . palatable. The aliens were just too alien - shockingly so, once we began to understand their nature. Not necessarily hostile, or even unfriendly . . . but unnervingly strange. The stuff of nightmares. So we invented a human story. Gallinule created Halvorsen and between us we fabricated enough evidence so that no one would question her reality. We manufactured a plausible history for her and then pasted her story over the real one.'

'The part about the aliens fleeing the neutron star merger?'

'That was completely true. But they were the only ones who ever crossed over. No humans ever followed them.'

'What about the Diggers?'

'They found the tunnels, explored them thoroughly, but it seems that they never intercepted the signals. They helped though; without them it would have been a lot harder to make Halvorsen's story sound convincing. ' She paused, childlike in her enthusiasm. 'We'll be the first, Merlin. Isn't that thrilling in a way?'

'For you, maybe. But you've always stared into the void, Sayaca. For everyone else, the idea will be chilling beyond words.'

'That's why they couldn't know the truth. They wouldn't have agreed to cross over otherwise.'

'I know. And I don't doubt that you did the right thing. After all, it's a matter of survival, isn't it?'

'They'll learn the truth eventually,' Sayaca said. 'When we've all crossed over. I don't know what'll happen to Gallinule and me then. We'll either be revered or hated. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see, but I suspect it may be the latter.'

'On the other hand, they'll know that you had the courage to face the truth and hide it from the others when you knew it had to be hidden. There's a kind of nobility in that, Sayaca.'

'Whatever we did, it was for the good of the Cohort. You understand that, don't you?'

'I never thought otherwise. Which doesn't mean I'm coming with you.'

Her mouth opened the tiniest of degrees. 'There's nothing for you here, Merlin. You'll die if you don't follow us. I don't love you the way I used to, but I still care for you.'

'Then why did you let me know the truth?'

'I never said I did. That must have been Gallinule's doing.' She paused. 'What was it, then?'

'Halvorsen,' Merlin said. 'She was created from scratch; a human who had never lived. You did a good job, as well. But there was something about her that I knew I'd seen before. Something so familiar I didn't see it at first. Then, of course, I knew.'

'What?'

'Gallinule based her on our mother. I always suspected he'd tried simulating her, but he denied it. That was another lie, as well. Halvorsen proved it.'

'Then he wanted you to know. As his brother.'

Merlin nodded. 'I suppose so.'

'Then will you follow us?'

He had already made his mind up, but he allowed a long pause before answering her. 'I don't think so, Sayaca. It just isn't my style. I know there's only a small chance that I can make the syrinx work for me, but I prefer running to hiding. I think I'll take that risk.'

'But the Council won't let you have the syrinx, Merlin. Even after we've all crossed over, they'll safeguard it here. Surround it with proctors that'll kill you if you try and steal it. They'll want it unharmed for when we return from the shadow universe.'

'I know.'

'Then why . . . oh, wait. I see.' She looked at him now, all empathy gone; something of the old Sayaca contempt showing through. 'You'll blackmail us, won't you? Threaten to tell the Council if we don't provide you with the syrinx.'

'You said it, not me.'

'Gallinule and I don't have that kind of influence, Merlin.'

'Then you'd better find it. It's not much to ask, is it? A small token of your gratitude for my silence. I'm sure you can think of something.' Merlin paused. 'After all, it would be a shame to spoil everything now. Halvorsen's story sounded so convincing too. I almost believed it myself.'

'You cold, calculating bastard.' But she said it with half a smile, admiring and loathing him at the same time.

'Just find a way, Sayaca. I know you can. Oh, and one other thing.'

'Yes?'

'Look after my brother, will you? He may not have quite my streak of brilliance, but he's still one of a kind. You're going to need people like him on the other side.'

'We could use you too, Merlin.'

'You probably could, but I've got other business to attend to. The small matter of an ultimate weapon against the Huskers, for instance. I'm going to find it, you know. Even if it takes me the rest of my life. I hope you'll come back and see how I did one day.'

Sayaca nodded, but said nothing. They both knew that there were no more words that needed to be said.

And, true to his expectations, Sayaca and Gallinule had come through. The syrinx was with him now - an uninteresting matt-black cone that held the secrets of crossing light-years in a few breaths of subjective time - sitting in its metal harness inside Tyrant. He did not know exactly how they had persuaded the Council to release it. Quite possibly there had been no persuasion at all, merely subterfuge. One black cone looked much like another, after all.

This, however, was the true syrinx, the last they had.

It was unimaginably precious now, and he would do his best to learn its secrets in the weeks ahead. Countless millions had died trying to gain entry to the Waymakers' transit system, and it was entirely possible that Merlin would simply be the next. But it did not have to be like that. He was alone now - possibly more alone than any human had ever been - but instead of despair what he felt was a cold, pure elation: he now had a mission, one that might prove to be soul-destroyingly difficult, even futile, but he had the will to accomplish it.

Somewhere behind him the syrinx began to purr.