Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days Read online

  “In which case Celestine was deeply fortunate, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I don’t think anyone would deny that,” I said. “To speculate about the shape of alien consciousness is one thing; but to drink it; to bathe in the full flood of it—to know it intimately, like a lover . . .” I trailed off for a moment. “Wait a minute. Shouldn’t you be on Resurgam, Celestine? There isn’t time for the expedition to have gone there and come back.”

  She eyed me with raptorial intent before answering, “I never went.”

  Childe leant over and refreshed my glass. “She was turned down at the last minute, Richard. Sylveste had a grudge against anyone who’d visited the Jugglers; he suddenly decided they were all unstable and couldn’t be trusted.”

  I looked at Celestine wonderingly. “Then all this time . . . ?”

  “I’ve been here, in Chasm City. Oh, don’t look so crushed, Richard. By the time I learned I’d been turned down, you’d already decided to flush me out of your past. It was better for both of us this way.”

  “But the deception . . .”

  Childe put one hand on my shoulder, calmingly. “There wasn’t any. She just didn’t make contact again. No lies; no deception; nothing to hold a grudge about.”

  I looked at him, angrily. “Then why the hell is she here?”

  “Because I happen to have use for someone with the skills that the Jugglers gave to Celestine.”

  “Which included?” I said.

  “Extreme mathematical prowess.”

  “And why would that have been useful?”

  Childe turned to the Ultra, indicating that the man should remove his bubbling apparatus.

  “I’m about to show you.”

  The table housed an antique holo-projection system. Childe handed out viewers which resembled lorgnette binoculars, and, like so many myopic opera buffs, we studied the apparitions which floated into existence above the polished mahogany surface.

  Stars: incalculable numbers of them—hard white and bloodred gems, strewn in lacy patterns against deep velvet blue.

  Childe narrated:

  “The better part of two and a half centuries ago, my uncle Giles—whose somewhat pessimistic handiwork you have already seen—made a momentous decision. He embarked on what we in the family referred to as the Program, and then only in terms of extreme secrecy.”

  Childe told us that the Program was an attempt at covert deep space exploration.

  Giles had conceived the work, funding it directly from the family’s finances. He had done this with such ingenuity that the apparent wealth of House Childe had never faltered, even as the Program entered its most expensive phase. Only a few select members of the Childe dynasty had even known of the Program’s existence, and that number had dwindled as time passed.

  The bulk of the money had been paid to the Ultras, who had already emerged as a powerful faction by that time.

  They had built the autonomous robot space probes according to this uncle’s desires, and then launched them towards a variety of target systems. The Ultras could have delivered his probes to any system within range of their lighthugger ships, but the whole point of the exercise was to restrict the knowledge of any possible discoveries to the family alone. So the envoys crossed space by themselves, at only a fraction of the speed of light, and the targets they were sent to were all poorly explored systems on the ragged edge of human space.

  The probes decelerated by use of solar sails, picked the most interesting worlds to explore, and then fell into orbit around them.

  Robots were sent down, equipped to survive on the surface for many decades.

  Childe waved his hand across the table. Lines radiated out from one of the redder suns in the display, which I assumed was Yellowstone’s star. The lines reached out towards other stars, forming a three-dimensional scarlet dandelion several dozen light-years wide.

  “These machines must have been reasonably intelligent,” Celestine said. “Especially by the standards of the time.”

  Childe nodded keenly. “Oh, they were. Cunning little blighters. Subtle and stealthy and diligent. They had to be, to operate so far from human supervision.”

  “And I presume they found something?” I said.

  “Yes,” Childe said testily, like a conjurer whose carefully scripted patter was being ruined by a persistent heckler. “But not immediately. Giles didn’t expect it to be immediate, of course—the envoys would take decades to reach the closest systems they’d been assigned to, and there’d still be the communicational timelag to take into consideration. So my uncle resigned himself to forty or fifty years of waiting, and that was erring on the optimistic side.” He paused and sipped from his wine. “Too bloody optimistic, as it happened. Fifty years passed . . . then sixty . . . but nothing of any consequence was ever reported back to Yellowstone, at least not in his lifetime. The envoys did, on occasion, find something interesting—but by then other human explorers had usually stumbled on the same find. And as the decades wore on, and the envoys failed to justify their invention, my uncle grew steadily more maudlin and bitter.”

  “I’d never have guessed,” Celestine said.

  “He died, eventually—bitter and resentful; feeling that the universe had played some sick cosmic trick on him. He could have lived for another fifty or sixty years with the right treatments, but I think by then he knew it would be a waste of time.”

  “You faked your death a century and a half ago,” I said. “Didn’t you tell me it had something to do with the family business?”

  He nodded in my direction. “That was when my uncle told me about the Program. I didn’t know anything about it until then—hadn’t heard even the tiniest hint of a rumour. No one in the family had. By then, of course, the project was costing us almost nothing, so there wasn’t even a financial drain to be concealed.”

  “And since then?”

  “I vowed not to make my uncle’s mistake. I resolved to sleep until the machines sent back a report, and then sleep again if the report turned out to be a false alarm.”

  “Sleep?” I said.

  He clicked his fingers and one entire wall of the room whisked back to reveal a sterile, machine-filled chamber.

  I studied its contents.

  There was a reefersleep casket of the kind Forqueray and his ilk used aboard their ships, attended by numerous complicated hunks of gleaming green support machinery. By use of such a casket, one might prolong the four hundred-odd years of a normal human lifespan by many centuries, though reefersleep was not without its risks.

  “I spent a century and a half in that contraption,” he said, “waking every fifteen or twenty years whenever a report trickled in from one of the envoys. Waking is the worst part. It feels like you’re made of glass; as if the next movement you make—the next breath you take—will cause you to shatter into a billion pieces. It always passes, and you always forget it an hour later, but it’s never easier the next time.” He shuddered visibly. “In fact, sometimes I think it gets harder each time.”

  “Then your equipment needs servicing,” Forqueray said dismissively. I suspected it was bluff. Ultras often wore a lock of braided hair for every crossing they had made across interstellar space and survived all the myriad misfortunes which might befall a ship. But that braid also symbolised every occasion on which they had been woken from the dead, at the end of the journey.

  They felt the pain as fully as Childe did, even if they were not willing to admit it.

  “How long did you spend awake each time?” I asked.

  “No more than thirteen hours. That was usually sufficient to tell if the message was interesting or not. I’d allow myself one or two hours to catch up on the news; what was going on in the wider universe. But I had to be disciplined. If I’d stayed awake longer, the attraction of returning to city life would have become overwhelming. That room began to feel like a prison.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Surely the subjective time must have passed very quickly?”

&n
bsp; “You’ve obviously never spent any time in reefersleep, Richard. There’s no consciousness when you’re frozen, granted—but the transitions to and from the cold state are like an eternity, crammed with strange dreams.”

  “But you hoped the rewards would be worth it?”

  Childe nodded. “And, indeed, they may well have been. I was last woken six months ago, and I’ve not returned to the chamber since. Instead, I’ve spent that time gathering together the resources and the people for a highly unusual expedition.”

  Now he made the table change its projection, zooming in on one particular star.

  “I won’t bore you with catalogue numbers, suffice to say that this is a system which no one around this table—with the possible exception of Forqueray—is likely to have heard of. There’ve never been any human colonies there, and no crewed vessel has ever passed within three light-years of it. At least, not until recently.”

  The view zoomed in again, enlarging with dizzying speed.

  A planet swelled up to the size of a skull, suspended above the table.

  It was hued entirely in shades of grey and pale rust, cratered and gouged here and there by impacts and what must have been very ancient weathering processes. Though there was a suggestion of a wisp of atmosphere—a smoky blue halo encircling the planet—and though there were icecaps at either pole, the world looked neither habitable nor inviting.

  “Cheerful-looking place, isn’t it?” Childe said. “I call it Golgotha.”

  “Nice name,” Celestine said.

  “But not, unfortunately, a very nice planet.” Childe made the view enlarge again, so that we were skimming the world’s bleak, apparently lifeless surface. “Pretty dismal, to be honest. It’s about the same size as Yellowstone, receiving about the same amount of sunlight from its star. Doesn’t have a moon. Surface gravity’s close enough to one gee that you won’t know the difference once you’re suited up. A thin carbon dioxide atmosphere, and no sign that anything’s ever evolved there. Plenty of radiation hitting the surface, but that’s about your only hazard, and one we can easily deal with. Golgotha’s tectonically dead, and there haven’t been any large impacts on her surface for a few million years.”

  “Sounds boring,” Hirz said.

  “And it very probably is, but that isn’t the point. You see, there’s something on Golgotha.”

  “What kind of something?” Celestine asked.

  “That kind,” Childe said.

  It came over the horizon.

  It was tall and dark, its details indistinct. That first view of it was like the first glimpse of a cathedral’s spire through morning fog. It tapered as it rose, constricting to a thin neck before flaring out again into a bulb-shaped finial, which in turn tapered to a needle-sharp point.

  Though it was impossible to say how large the thing was, or what it was made of, it was very obviously a structure, as opposed to a peculiar biological or mineral formation. On Grand Teton, vast numbers of tiny single-celled organisms conspired to produce the slime towers which were that world’s most famous natural feature, and while those towers reached impressive heights and were often strangely shaped, they were unmistakably the products of unthinking biological processes rather than conscious design. The structure on Golgotha was too symmetric for that, and entirely too solitary. If it had been a living thing, I would have expected to see others like it, with evidence of a supporting ecology of different organisms.

  Even if it were a fossil, millions of years dead, I could not believe that there would be just one on the whole planet.

  No. The thing had most definitely been put there.

  “A structure?” I asked Childe.

  “Yes. Or a machine. It isn’t easy to decide.” He smiled. “I call it Blood Spire. Almost looks innocent, doesn’t it? Until you look closer.”

  We spun round the Spire, or whatever it was, viewing it from all directions. Now that we were closer, it was clear that the thing’s surface was densely detailed; patterned and textured with geometrically complex forms, around which snaked intestinal tubes and branching, veinlike bulges. The effect was to undermine my earlier certainty that the thing was non-biological.

  Now it looked like some sinewy fusion of animal and machine: something that might have appealed in its grotesquerie to Childe’s demented uncle.

  “How tall is it?” I asked.

  “Two hundred and fifty metres,” Childe said.

  I saw that now there were tiny glints on Golgotha’s surface, almost like metallic flakes which had fallen from the side of the structure.

  “What are those?” I asked.

  “Why don’t I show you?” Childe said.

  He enlarged the view still further, until the glints resolved into distinct shapes.

  They were people.

  Or—more accurately—the remains of what had once been people. It was impossible to say how many there had been. All had been mutilated in some fashion: crushed or pruned or bisected; the tattered ruins of their spacesuits were still visible in one or two places. Severed parts accompanied the bodies, often several tens of metres from the rightful owner.

  It was as if they had been flung away in a fit of temper.

  “Who were they?” Forqueray asked.

  “A crew who happened to slow down in this system to make shield repairs,” Childe said. “Their captain was called Argyle. They chanced upon the Spire and started exploring it, believing it to contain something of immense technological value.”

  “And what happened to them?”

  “They went inside in small teams, sometimes alone. Inside the Spire they passed through a series of challenges, each of which was harder than the last. If they made a mistake, the Spire punished them. The punishments were initially mild, but they became steadily more brutal. The trick was to know when to admit defeat.”

  I leaned forward. “How do you know all this?”

  “Because Argyle survived. Not long, admittedly, but long enough for my machine to get some sense out of him. It had been on Golgotha the whole time, you see—watching Argyle’s arrival, hiding and recording them as they confronted the Spire. And it watched him crawl out of the Spire, shortly before the last of his colleagues was ejected.”

  “I’m not sure I’m prepared to trust either the testimony of a machine or a dying man,” I said.

  “You don’t have to,” Childe answered. “You need only consider the evidence of your eyes. Do you see those tracks in the dust? They all lead into the Spire, and there are almost none leading to the bodies.”

  “Meaning what?” I said.

  “Meaning that they got inside, the way Argyle claimed. Observe also the way the remains are distributed. They’re not all at the same distance from the Spire. They must have been ejected from different heights, suggesting that some got closer to the summit than others. Again, it accords with Argyle’s story.”

  With a sinking feeling of inevitability I saw where this was heading. “And you want us to go there and find out what it was they were so interested in. Is that it?”

  He smiled. “You know me entirely too well, Richard.”

  “I thought I did. But you’d have to be quite mad to want to go anywhere near that thing.”

  “Mad? Possibly. Or simply very, very curious. The question is—” He paused and leaned across the table to refill my glass, all the while maintaining eye contact. “Which are you?”

  “Neither,” I said.

  But Childe could be persuasive. A month later I was frozen aboard Forqueray’s ship.

  TWO

  We reached orbit around Golgotha.

  Thawed from reefersleep we convened for breakfast, riding a travel pod upship to the lighthugger’s meeting room.

  Everyone was there, including Trintignant and Forqueray, the latter inhaling from the same impressive array of flasks, retorts and spiralling tubes he had brought with him to Yellowstone. Trintignant had not slept with the rest of us, but looked none the worse for wear. He had, Childe said, his own rat
her specialised plumbing requirements, incompatible with standard reefersleep systems.

  “Well, how was it?” Childe asked, throwing a comradely arm around my shoulders.

  “Every bit as . . . dreadful as I’d been led to expect.” My voice was slurred, sentences taking an age to form in whatever part of my brain it was that handled language. “Still a bit fuzzy.”

  “Well, we’ll soon fix that. Trintignant can synthesise a medichine infusion to pep up those neural functions, can’t you, Doctor?”

  Trintignant looked at me with his handsome, immobile mask of a face. “It would be no trouble at all, my dear fellow . . .”

  “Thanks.” I steadied myself; my mind crawled with half-remembered images of the botched cybernetic experiments which had earned Trintignant his notoriety. The thought of him pumping tiny machines into my skull made my skin crawl. “But I’ll pass on that for now. No offence intended.”

  “And absolutely none taken.” Trintignant gestured towards a vacant chair. “Come. Sit with us and join in the discussion. The topic, rather interestingly, is the dreams some of us experienced on the way here.”

  “Dreams . . . ?” I said. “I thought it was just me. I wasn’t the only one?”

  “No,” Hirz said, “you weren’t the only one. I was on a moon in one of them. Earth’s, I think. And I kept on trying to get inside this alien structure. Fucking thing kept killing me, but I’d always keep going back inside, like I was being brought back to life each time just for that.”

  “I had the same dream,” I said, wonderingly. “And there was another dream in which I was inside some kind of—” I halted, waiting for the words to assemble in my head. “Some kind of underground tomb. I remember being chased down a corridor by an enormous stone ball which was going to roll over me.”

  Hirz nodded. “The dream with the hat, right?”

  “My God, yes.” I grinned like a madman. “I lost my hat, and I felt this ridiculous urge to rescue it!”

  Celestine looked at me with something between icy detachment and outright hostility. “I had that one too.”