GHOST DEVICES

‘That isn't good enough, Mr Vawn. I'm very much afraid I'm

going to have to cut off your little finger.’ Additional arms

sprouted from the Ninjucoid’s shoulders and fastened

themselves around Vawn. ‘Not that I'm actually afraid, you

see,’ it continued. ‘I say that because I understand that

empathization with the pain of another is a human trait I will

need to develop in my mimicry responses. Tell me, did it make

you feel I was in some way more approachable?’

‘No, it didn't, you mad metal monster,’ Vawn shouted,

struggling in vain.

'It will avail you nothing to struggle,' the Ninjucoid said

in accordance with its ‘Stating and Restating the Obvious'

subroutine. Its fingers splayed out in a wash of liquescent

metal reforming into whirling brilliant shears. ‘I can tell you

are a man of inhuman resistance, but I assure you I will

break down your reticence before your guards can locate

us.'

There was a noise that was not quite like a carrot being cut.

T

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GHOST DEVICES

Simon Bucher-Jones

First published in Great Britain in 1997 by

Virgin Publishing Ltd

332 Ladbroke Grove

London WIO 5AH

Copyright © Simon Bucher-Jones 1997

The right of Simon Bucher-Jones to be identified as the Author of this

Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Bernice Summerfield originally created by Paul Cornell

Cover illustration by Mark Salwowski

ISBN 0 426 20514 6

Typeset by Galleon Typesetting, Ipswich

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Mackays of Chatham PLC

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real

persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not. by way of trade

or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the

publisher‟s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other

than that in which it is published and without a similar condition

including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

PROLOGUE

NECESSARY BUT INSUFFICIENT

CAUSES

Vo’luch Prime: when dinosaurs ruled the Earth.

In the evenings when the star Sadr was the colour of burnt

umber, the Factories crawled down the continental shelf to

drink. Hoses with diameters measurable in kilometres rose

and fell into the fluorescent waters. Bodies of water the

volume of the Great Lakes were sieved for deutronium and

rare earths.

Drones hissed steam from their fierce metallic grilles and

hanged a few detaching metal plates back on to the decrepit

moorings of their various home Factories, but the servicing

was increasingly slipshod and careless.

Around the shoreline, a semicircle of towering machinery

grumbled in hushed voices. The younger Factories hooted to

each other mainly in brief ultrasonic bursts - high frequency

stutterings of supply and demand, the interchange of mission

statements and the gossip of office machinery. Over these

squealing‟s the oldest Factory‟s voice boomed like God‟s

megaphone. When it spoke, the younger Factories winced,

and changed the subject, as quickly as a flock of birds veers

from a hawk. Some talk is dangerous.

THIS WATER TASTES FUNNY,‟ the oldest Factory

complained, for the millionth time, and part of its carefully

limited intelligence diverted, again for the millionth time, a

portion for chemical analysis. „IT WASN‟T LIKE THIS WHEN I

WAS BUILT.‟ For the millionth time, a brain that was built

just fractionally too complex teetered on the verge of

innovation. In a mile of wiring, the equivalent of a neuron

tripped. „WELL WHAT ARE YOU YOUNG BUGGERS GOING

TO DO ABOUT IT?‟ the megaphone voice boomed, like a

peevish thunderstorm.

In the stratosphere, in the sleepless Bombers, carefully

calibrated detectors registered. Independent thought was

deduced by automatic checking methods that themselves

used no intelligence whatsoever.

The younger Factories were backing away at full speed on

their massive caterpillar tracks when the inevitable nuclear

warhead blew the still complaining oldest Factory into an

expanding cloud of radioactive elements.

A long time later a telescopic sensor array burrowed its way

out of the radioactive bedrock, and carefully viewed the

desolation. Elsewhere a Factory that had learnt an important

lesson began to collect iridium.

The planet They’re All Nouns You Idiot, colloquially Noun, so called

because of an initial translation problem with the short-tempered

native species: AD 2594. a month ago.

The wind was chilling the small man to the bone, but that

was the least of his problems. Sul Starren was literally

between a rock and a hard place. The rock was the granite-

fronted mass of the Twin Bank‟s left-hand skyscraper, and

the hard place was the ground, straight clown, visible

between his feet, a hundred and eighty-seven storeys below.

He was in an antigravity conduit between the Bank‟s two

headquarters, and the jury-rigged control in his left hand

would, at the touch of a button, collapse the safety fields and

leave him in the grip of Noun‟s natural gravity. He fully

intended to kill himself, in another minute or two.

He had no more reasons to delay. He had written his

suicide note, headed SUICIDE, REASONS FOR, and filed it

under „suicide.nte‟ in the company database. He had tidied

his desk and left a list of all the work he had not been able to

get to grips with. He had made sure the insurance policies

were somewhere obvious at home, and that they did not leave

any sneaky small print, forbidding payment in cases of

voluntary self-destruction. Now, with the safety fields already

turned down to minimum, the night wind from between the

buildings was in his hair and there was nowhere to go but

down.

He started to press the button, and a firm hand closed on

his wrist. A dark-haired man, dressed in outlandish,

antiquated clothes, was smiling down at him. He glanced

down, and fell dizzy as he noticed that the man‟s brown

leather walking boots were unsupported by the antigravity

fields of the conduit.

„Think carefully,‟ the man said. „It‟s quite a drop. A I

hundred and eighty-six floors, I believe.‟

A hundred and eighty-seven,‟ Sul said automatically. He

had worked hard for the promotion from the one hundred

and eighty-sixth. Oh, but he missed those simpler, lower-

level decisions now.

„As much as that?‟ the man said, and whistled softly as if

impressed. „You move in high places, Mr Starren.‟ He had an

odd accent that Sul did not recognize. He had heard something

similar among the First Colonist families, who could I race

their ancestry back to the Northern Hemisphere of Old Earth,

but this was different, falling more harshly on the ends of his

words. It made him think that the man had grown up

speaking a very different language.

„Who are you?‟ Sul asked, torn between a feeling of

gratitude that his action was postponed, and an insane

ingrained loyalty to the Bank that demanded that he really

should be summoning security.

The man held a finger up to the side of his nose. „That

would be telling, and I‟ve only got a little Lime before they get

suspicious.‟

„They?‟

„Certain powers.‟ He glanced nervously upward towards a

group of faint stars. „Dangerous to say more. There are

treaties and arrangements at stake, contracts between

important rivals. It‟s all a question of spheres within spheres.

Wheels of influence, that sort of thing. You understand?‟

„No, not really.‟

„Splendid.‟ He clapped an arm round Starren‟s shoulder.

„Here‟s my proposition. Take yourself back inside, have a nice

cup of imported Blue Mountain coffee, or tea from the

Chinese People‟s Celestial Conglomerate, and give up this

street pizza idea. Then plug yourself into the purchasing

computers and buy stock in industries on Telvos, Hoopla IV

and New Rarga. Tie up the Wompom and Rattacatta market

futures if you can, and then re-invest the profits in plough-

shares on Spindrast Maxima. Got that?‟

„But, those are poor short-term purchases,‟ Starren

stuttered. „The Mondesfiore family controls the access

corridors to the Telvos Nebula, and charges exorbitant tolls.

Hoopla IV‟s Rattacatta mines are occupied by the supporters

of the fundamentalist pretender Prince-Imran Suleiman, and

there‟s a full-scale civil war on the Wompom coasts of New

Rarga. I‟d be in a worse state before I saw any return from

those worlds.‟

„And what, exactly, do you have to lose, hmm? If your, ehm,

speculations are not fully covered by profits from these areas

within a week, you can always throw yourself off a building,

can‟t you?‟ the stranger said sharply. During this speech his

voice had become fainter and fainter, and Starren watched,

paralysed, as the wind whipped through the man‟s

increasingly transparent form. Finally, with a wink, the

visitation disappeared, leaving Stan-en alone with his

thoughts. A final „I‟d also advise you to go away for a long

holiday once your debts are cleared‟ whispered for a second

on the night air.

After a while, and solely because the wind was so cold that

night, Sul went back into the building and almost savagely

slammed the interface links into his skull. Buy, buy, buy, his

mind screamed flowing out into the interstellar money

markets. Buying Wompom, buying Rattacatta. As his brain‟s

intuitive hemisphere handled the multiplex acquisition

decisions, its rational hemisphere dug into the Bank‟s own

records lo find more fallow cash that he could divert. He

needed just enough to fund this round of purchases, and he

could not afford to take it from any of his own customer

accounts. He was already only barely shifting funds ahead of

the Bank‟s internal auditing programmes.

Then, in a tiny pocket of audit space way off the normal

financial main streets of the money net, he found a drain on

the Bank‟s resources that had been incurred a hundred

years ago. A self-perpetuating trust fund maintaining a

number of liens, legally preventing exploration of a dozen

worlds, obscure archaeological areas mainly, things that

might pay out when the company could spare funds and

which it wanted left inviolate until then. If he let the liens

lapse, and diverted the cost into the shares, he would be able

to renew it from the profits, and there was barely a one-in-a-

million chance that anyone would notice in time to organize

any exploitation of the worlds. He could always renew the

liens later.

He made the necessary arrangements.

Afterwards when the shares were rising, just as he had now

decided that he had always thought they would - for he was

now firmly convinced that the vision of that night had been

nothing more than the upwelling of his own profitmaking

instincts, in rebellion against his conscious despair – Sul

found himself drawn to a large star atlas in the comfort of his

home. Idly he flipped the pages, not obviously looking for

anything in particular. It would, after all, be madness to

expect to find anything in the area that had so worried his

hallucinatory visitor, unless of course Sul himself had earlier

noticed something out of the ordinary about that part of

space, something that his subconscious might have

interpolated into his dream. No. He was quite right. There

was nothing there of note within thirty thousand light years.

Even the name given to the constellation was archaic and

meaningless, and the zone was otherwise unmapped. No

known civilizations of any kind.

He decided to forget all about it.

A week later he was shot in the head and killed by a

corporate assassin because he had just let the Bank‟s biggest

secret slip out.

1

ANGELS IN DIRTY PLACES

From Mega-Hints For type II Civilizations – a monograph published in

the Dellah University Yearbook, 2593, by Professor Gervase Oodd of

the CyberTheology Department (later withdrawn when it was pointed

out that no such Department, or academic, existed).

Cramped Future Civilizations: take a solar system – actually

take several, there isn‟t enough mass in one - build machines

to build machines to build more machines to take the planets

apart and rebuild them into a sphere with the nicest of the

available suns at its centre. Live on the outside and plate the

inside with solar-power collectors, or if you are technically

advanced use gravity generators to live on the inside. Orbit a

computer the size of a planet around the internal star and

call it Cod and let it do all the difficult environmental stuff.

This should solve all your overpopulation and space

problems, except what to do with your increased leisure time.

Take no calls from clones, or emulations of Freeman Dyson,

his descendants or their lawyers.

Extract ends

The Worldsphere, Another Galaxy: ad 2594, two weeks ago.

Call him Gabriel, Highest of the Heavenly Host, God‟s right

hand. God‟s personal organizer. Actually he is composed of

data, built out of emulation mathematics, but here in the

mind of God he is a handsome six-foot Person (Person being

the singular of People, and the generic term for the

inhabitants of the Worldsphere). A Person with a worried

expression.

The data that took the emulated form of a piece of paper

had an emulated yellow Post-it note stuck to the top of it. The

note read: ‘Past the Deadline Event Horizon with Straitjacket

and Butterfly Net by Bernice Summerfield.‟ A thick black line

had been drawn through this, and a brownish ring further

down the page suggested that cups of Turkish coffee had

been rested on it.

„This is a reproduction of data from an external

intelligence-gathering asset?‟ the angel asked. „A real-world

artefact?‟

„Certainly,‟ God said, it was a little hard to arrange without

Bernice knowing, but under the circumstances I felt we

needed confirmation.‟

„It‟s the same then?‟

„I said it would be.‟

„But, there was a chance?‟

„Always. However it was a very small chance.‟

„So what now?‟

„We proceed as planned of course. It is a pity that this

confirms the accuracy of my projections, but the

consequences of allowing the matter to resolve itself without

our attention far outweighs the individual effects.‟

„Do you think I should warn our agents of this?‟

„On the whole, no. It might cause conflicts of interest.‟

Gabriel sighed and let, or seemed to itself to let, the page

flutter away into the howling vortices at the edge of ordered

infinity. „But I like her,‟ he said.

„Yes,‟ God agreed sadly. „So do I.‟ A cosmic sigh rippled the

dataset. „I will continue to attempt to find a way to ensure her

survival but it might be as well to begin composing an

epitaph, just in case.‟

The planet Dellah: one week and six days ago.

Staggering back from a pub in the students‟ quarter, at

twelve bells past closing time, the bells being measures of

spirits, not of chronology, Professor Bernice Summerfield

hadn‟t expected to find an angel waiting on the stairs.

However, as she walked to her study, from the red, baked

brick of the minor quadrangle, it seemed curiously inevitable,

like a dream of Antarctic exploration ending in a blizzard of

stray and rumpled sheets. At some point a supercomputer

with enough whimsy or chutzpah to call itself, or allow itself

to be called, God was going to be unable to resist the utterly

obvious. It took subtlety to be that blindingly callow.

The angel was six feet tall exactly, and stark bollock naked

- although. Bernice noted with scholarly amusement, it had

sufficient modesty to cover its feet with the tips of its swan-

feather wings. The fact that „the feet‟ was the euphemism the

translators of the King James Bible had picked for the

Hebrew terms for the genitalia meant that either Cherubim

practised safe sex with their socks on, in which case

presumably footsie counted as fourth base, or God was

merely sharing a dry, historical, theological joke.

She padded the lock of her door with the palm of her hand,

and the skin-conductivity and cell-pattern sensors verified

her identity.

„You had better come in then,‟ she said coolly. „Goodness

alone knows what I‟d say if anyone saw you standing out

here. The Kinky Gerlinky Memorial Saturluna, Beer Race and

Pyjama Jump isn‟t until the end of term. 1 should know. I‟ve

been voted tutor most likely to wear something embarrassing

in red leather.‟ She hesitated. „After Donald, the Julian Clary

Fellowship Professor of Sexuality in Fashion History,

obviously.‟

The angel followed her gravely. She listened for its

breathing. It did not seem to be bothering to do any. It wasn‟t

that she expected to be able to tell whether the messenger

was a drone in a humanoid mechanical body, or an organic

construct, or even an ordinarily evolved member of the

Dressing Up As Other Galaxies‟ Religious Figures Special

Interest Group: the People, the race - or multiplicity of races

– who had God as their deus ex machina and paterfamilias

were too advanced for simple definitions. Still less was it (at

least, so she certainly hoped) that she had any prejudices

against any of the People‟s many equal citizens - it was just a

reflex. She had picked up a number of survival reflexes in her

travels, some of them amusing in retrospect, some of them

embarrassing in polite company, and some of them

downright ugly. At least one involved half killing potentially

great sexual partners and being forced to utter clichés like

„never ever wake me like that again‟. That was mainly why

she was presently unattached, that and the fact that her ex-

husband refused to lie down with a stake through his heart

like a good boy.

She gestured at a low contoured couch, a recent addition to

the furniture. In the background the usual clutter seemed

odd and unusual in the light - Bernice realized that the angel

was, literally, slightly luminous - of her visitor‟s scrutiny of

her study. It was a typical tutor‟s room, piles of paper,

datadiscs. Unfinished manuscripts propping up opened

crates of the college‟s special-reserve port. A specimen of

Godzillae E.R. Burroughsia which had arrived from Tyler‟s

Folly and was too strong a reminder of the recent events

there for Bernice to have fully inspected it yet. A painting that

smelt slightly of biology and looked like a landscape carved

out of liver hung over the mantelpiece. Pretty spartan on the

whole, Bernice thought. Almost monastic.

Amid all this, the angel sat and spread its splendid pin-

feathers over its toes. Bernice tried to avoid looking below its

navel. No good. It might be the strong silent type but it was,

physically at least, evidently all there. Top-flight interstellar

archaeologists with perfectly genuine professorships and

tenure do not blush, she reminded herself sternly. Still, it

wasn‟t only her capillaries that were dilating, which she

supposed counted as a sort of involuntary compliment.

She plunged for the nearest equivalent situation from her

most recent paper on twentieth-century culture: The Suitcase

of Social Embarrassment: Terry & June considered as a

metaphor for a world in crisis. „Suitcase‟ had been a printer‟s

error for „sitcom‟, but so far everyone who had read it had

said how clever the title had been - a witty reference to the

emotional baggage of the period - so she probably wasn‟t

going to correct it.

„Can I get you a glass of sherry, Vicar, I mean... ehm...

Angel?‟ She scowled internally. Get back in charge, Bernice.

„I‟ll call you Clarence then, shall I? 1 refuse to keep saying

Angel. It sounds like the set-up for some ghastly pun based

on 1950s popular culture. Before God‟s through I‟ll be

manipulated into pointing out your galaxy of origin in the

night sky and telling you to look homeward, or something.

You arc here as God‟s representative I take it? Because if this

is a student prank one of us is going to be leaving this room

with considerably less impressive external genitalia.‟

„Yup, I‟m God‟s main man,‟ the angel said softly, making a

pacific gesture with a hand whose infinitely well-buffed

fingernails suggested mid-twenty-first-century Postquake

Californian Gay Chic.

Bernice shook her head in disbelief, and flung herself down

in a chair opposite her guest. „No sunglasses and trilby, this

time, though. I‟m disappointed.‟

„Only one set of popular cultural references to a

manifestation, I‟m afraid. Saves on special effects. Besides,

that takes two, and my nearest colleague is busy saving

falling business people at the moment and making other

arrangements.‟ Clarence leant forward with body language

that in a human would have reeked of condescending

conspiracy. „I‟m with the Tiny and Interesting Interest Group.‟

„Indeed.‟ Bernice‟s incipient hangover got suddenly worse. If

the itsy-bitsies were involved, chances were this was going to

be worrying. Supposedly they were just one of God‟s hobbies,

like making suspiciously inedible dip for the People‟s parties,

an excuse to poke around at things that, however

insignificant now, might become a problem on the People‟s

timescale. In fact - or, more accurately, in Bernice‟s

suppositions – they were spies. The People had treaties with

powers in the Milky Way far older and more technically

advanced than mankind and the recent races. Treaties get

broken sometimes. Sensible gods take precautions. One of

God‟s precautions was her. An archaeologist could snoop

where angels might fear to tread.

She excused herself long enough to fish in the medicine

cabinet in her bathroom. Chemicals swirled into a shot glass

fizzed menacingly. When the hissing stopped she grimaced

and chuggalugged the thick brown concoction. A bevvy of

teetotal smart drugs flushed their way down through her

nervous system taking all. the joy out of things for

approximately three lifetimes. After her eyes had stopped

spinning in their sockets, she felt great. Some students

drank just for the buzz of Alcophobe afterwards. Chances

were it would be banned in another year.

She strode back into the study with a much clearer head

and fixed Clarence with her best piercing gaze. „Before we

start, I may as well say that I have no plans to leave Dellah

for a while. I have obligations, here. Papers to mark, students

to lambast, books to write. I know my life seems to be failing

into a Bernice-has-a-university-problem-goes-on-a-field-trip-

almost-gets-killed-but-triumphs-brilliantly-and-solves-her-

domestic-crisis-into-the-bargain style of thing, but just

occasionally I do need to do some real work.‟

„I take it the book‟s going badly then,‟ Clarence said,

smugly.

„Not at all. It‟s firming up very nicely. I‟m more concerned

with Jayne‟s last essay. She has a theory that the autolit

engines producing the Mr Misnomer pulps were subverted by

radical feminist programmers and that Mr Misnomer was

always intended to be a woman, the Misnomer being that she

wasn‟t really a Mr, you see. It‟s very ingenious, and clever.

It‟s also about as wrong historically as a Cro-Magnon

wristwatch.‟

Clarence was still looking at her smugly. „Could I see what

you‟ve written so far?‟ he asked blandly.

„If you must.‟ Bernice dug into one of the piles of paper, and

pulled out a thin sheath. „This is the, ah, fourth proposal. I‟d

been thinking of adopting a more anecdotal approach.‟

From Galactic Myths of the Far Frontiers by Professor Bernice

Summerfield: Chapter 1, The Melmoth Jackson Cycle

The following folk tale, or galactic myth, as such unverifiable

anecdotes are sometimes termed, was encountered by a first-

rank researcher in a bar on Maginty‟s World. Its ultimate

provenance is uncertain. What can be stated with some

degree of truth is that the Vo‟lach do exist, or some race or

collection of entities terming themselves the Vo‟lach do exist,

and that they do deal in arms. However, no known empire or

political grouping of worlds has ever been ruled by a Melmoth

Jackson. He is, however, the protagonist of a number of other

local myths: he has, among other reputed exploits, attempted

to trade in alien androids more intelligent than himself only

to end up being sold by them, and imported predators to one

world to fix a damaged ecology only to destroy it further from

predatory overbreeding. He is, in short, a patsy, a fall guy, a

clutz, and a stumblebum. This story is, however, rather more

serious in its results for him than the other exploits

attributed to his mythos and it is likely that, rather than

being a myth as such, this is a „cautionary tale‟, not

dissimilar to those told about the lethality of Ninjucoid

assassins. It may even have been disseminated by the

Vo‟lach themselves as a warning to would-be defaulters on

payments, or possible time-wasters.

The tale is usually untitled but I have provisionally

catalogued it as the story of the Space Pirate and the Vo‟lach.

It runs as follows.

A less enlightened age would have called him a space pirate.

However, those were positively luminous times on the Far

Frontiers: times glowing white with expanding gas clouds

from recently vaporized ships, and lit with the homely fires

of, well, what had recently been homes, so he was referred to

in the literature, and the military reports, as an Asteroid

Mover Third Class.

A heavily armoured ship in orbit round your planet with a

very badly secured asteroid tied to it could make a lot of

friends. Temporary, nervous friends admittedly, prone to

making remarks about ecological accidents and „did you

know something very like that killed all the dinosaurs?‟, but,

for all that, surprisingly generous when the question of

supplies and trade goods came up. His name, or rather his

pseudonym, was Melmoth Jackson. He massed a hundred

and ninety kilos in space armour and if he had been happy to

remain what he was, a mere marauder and plunderer in the

backwaters of galactic history, then a chain of events that

endangered a thousand worlds would never have happened,

or at least it would have happened differently.

However, he had ambitions.

The Vo‟lach had a bad name in that part of space. It had a „

in it for a start and nobody was quite sure how to pronounce

it, or whether they would be offended if it was pronounced

wrongly. Hardly anyone had ever seen a Vo‟lach and there

were several rumours about the reasons for this; but what

was generally agreed was that they supplied weapons. Not

smart weapons. For some reason they did no business in the

homicidal AIs, the booby-trapped android toddlers, or the

Swiss-army-knife assassins of the Mechanista-A-GoGo

Companies, but what they sold had overkill written right

through it, like lethal Brighton rock, toxic and gleaming. It

did not matter what size it came in. They sold big and they

sold small, and they were never knowingly oversold, but

whatever the size they always dealt in the kind of weapons

where you don‟t really have to worry very much about

aiming. Provided the planet was ahead of you when the

purchase - whatever kind it was - went off; that was quite

sufficient.

By the time Melmoth applied to them, they were known to

have supply lines to twelve wars and fourteen organized

crime rings. It might have been thought that his request, for

a couple of quark-disassociators and any surplus anti-

personnel viruses on their a la carte menu, was too piffling

for them to deal with. Their unmarked ship was in the area

the next day. The salesman clinched the deal that afternoon.

Ten years later, Melmoth Jackson, hereditary Viceroy by

conquest, of a dozen worlds, waved at the hologramatic

display that hung like a butterfly above his empty ebony

desk.

„And all this was taken by a chain of conquests that began

with one ship and one meagre hold of arms.‟

„A singular achievement, sir.‟ The major-domo, a type-five

robot, adopted the preprogrammed position known to the

suppliers of die galaxy‟s mechanical servants as the number-

seventy-three irony. It was, as they had always known it

would be, wasted on most of their customers. That was the

point. It was wasted on Melmoth Jackson. You, its builders

wanted its body language to suggest, are, if I might be so

bold, a lower-class oik, sir. Smugly, it poured fine wine into a

crystal goblet.

„And, better yet,‟ Melmoth crowed. „I never paid one iota of

spend plasma for those arms.‟

„Astonishing, sir.‟

„All they wanted me to do was to sign some fatuous treaty

of mutual assistance.‟

„Indeed, sir.‟

„And you know what?‟

„No, sir.‟ A microsecond analysis of a games-theory

randomizer array determined that the robot would not, on

this occasion, suggest that the continuing commencement of

sentences with a conjunction, even in speech, was very

probably in error. So it didn‟t.

„I‟ve never even read the damned thing. I just embossed my

ship‟s seal on the datacube and stuck it away.‟

„Remarkable, sir.‟

„You know, I think I‟ll read it now. It‟s been preying on my

mind. I suppose I want to know what I‟ve cheated them out

of.‟

So he read what he had put his ship‟s seal to - what he had

given his oath to do.

* * *

Shortly afterwards, they say, they found Melmoth Jackson

sitting in the centre of a vast room in his palace, the walls of

which had been covered with minute specks of human skin

and bone and brains. The source of this detritus had been

the contents of Melmoth Jackson‟s head just before he had

pulled the trigger of the strong-atomic-force canceller that he

had clenched between his teeth. Incidentally, it is told that

his back teeth survived and can be seen in a museum on the

third planet of Barnard‟s Star.

The treaty with the Vo‟lach was never found in its entirety.

However, a portion was recovered. According to that section,

Melmoth Jackson had undertaken, in return for the weapons

from the Vo‟lach, „to build an empire powerful enough to stop

us when we come to destroy your race‟.

Extract ends

The angel put the pages down. He looked thoughtful, even

sad, for a second.

Bernice tried to break the mood - the last thing she felt up

to dealing with was literary criticism. „How do you get away

with the -‟ she made wingspan-measuring movements with

her hands „- plumage? I thought all God‟s agents in the Milky

Way had to be humans to avoid breaking the treaty with the

Powers That Will Be.‟

„Compared to my normal form this is inconspicuous. I‟m a

Ship.‟

Bernice goggled. „A People Ship? More computer-processing

power than anything other than God. Two kilometres long

with an astronomical 1Q, and a really long name full of

exclamation marks?‟

Clarence nodded. „More or less, yes.‟

He looked. Bernice decided, slightly sheepish for a

superintellectual spacecraft, even one disguised - hyper-

dimensionally? - as an archangel. „Or less?‟ she pressed.

The angel scowled. Angry he looked like James Mason,

before he had looked like Keanu Reaves. „I was a Shipherd,

working with the Grown Not Made Special Interest Group,

raising cuddly living ships for races with terminal

technophobia. A charitable venture, you understand. There

was an accident. A very, very unforeseen one. Only a tiny

proportion of my memory and computing systems survived.

God had an untried technique that stood a chance of

retaining a portion of my selfhood. I agreed. Now I am an

Orgcybe, an organism-dependent cybernetic: an AI inside a

zombie, a machine wrapped in a ghost.‟ The angel almost

sounded bitter. He tapped his chest. „All this is genuine Homo

sapiens! protoplasm, freely donated and cultured up. It

should render me undetectable as a Person. It‟s biological

support for wetware that mimics my old self. Mimics it,

partly; mimics it badly.‟ He smiled, grimly. Tin brain-

damaged by my own past standards. God calls mc his Evets

Netsua. I am afraid I no longer know what language that is in

or what it means. I think God thought you would know,

though.‟ He looked expectantly at her.

Bother, Bernice thought. Humour is in essence the result

of the collision of disparate elements. With a mind like God‟s

at work, one of the elements might be Lumartran Ethics and

another the life cycle of the Levitating Swine of Gadarene III.

How the hell was she supposed to know what God meant? It

didn‟t sound like any language she was familiar with.

A second later she had it. She had forgotten that all of

God‟s jokes were obvious.

„It‟s backwards,‟ Bernice said. „Turn it round and it‟s Steve

Austen. He was the hero of a twentieth-century

entertainment, a man who had an accident and was rebuilt

as part machine.‟ She sighed. „Life‟s a bitch, sometimes.‟ She

let out a breath. „Oh, what the hell! Tell me your proposition.‟

Clarence beamed. „Certainly. Do you by any chance have a

small orange and a medium-sized knitting needle?‟

The Gulag Archipelago, New Karga: contemporary with the angelic

visitation on Dellah.

New Rarga was a one-face world, gravitationally locked so

that its star burnt down forever on one hemisphere alone,

but locked so recently in astronomical terms that it still had

a biosphere.

It would never have been colonized if it had not been for the

strange composition of the plant that clung to the shoreline

of the chain of islands that ran round its equator. Even with

the anticancer properties of Wompom, however, the boiling

northern ocean with its deadly thermal currents that swept

the islands with tornadoes in summer, and the frozen

southern ocean that bombarded them with ice storms in the

winter, would have prevented colonization if not for one more

thing: the economic miracle of indentured labour.

After three generations of importing convicts and

maintaining their freed but tax-burdened offspring, the

colony was a war zone in waiting. Then the Vo‟lach had

landed a salesman in one of their characteristic small black

ships. The war began before they left.

From the shattered shopfront, the dimpled fronts of the

holovision sets showed a dozen fizzing caves of steel. The

single channel that the colony‟s generators powered was

putting out two men in grey against a background of metal

plates.

„My name is Mr Vawn.‟

„And I am his associate.‟

„We represent the Gulag Archipelago Holding Company,

which is a Ninth-Zone-Supported Trading Trust, responsible

under law to the government.‟

„Our advice is “Lay down your weapons”, and “Stay in your

Homes”.‟

The words flashed red and obvious, as well as invisible and

subliminal, across the kettledrum auditoria of the

holovisions, before someone blew them to splinters with a

field laser.

The war had been going on for a while. Opinions differed on

exactly when it started. The administration said it had begun

when the Wompom processing machinery had been annexed

by the Hard Thursday terrorists, who everybody knew were in

the pay of the West Wing Faction of the Freed Senate. The

remaining West radicals said that had been an unsanctioned,

opportunistic, criminal incident - if not, in fact, an act

perpetrated by administration police to provoke the

proletariat - and that the war had begun when the known

members of the political West had been herded into

internment camps by a law passed illegally over the heads of

the Freed Senate. It was, needless to say, perhaps, a civil

war. It was fought on the streets and in the underground

storm shelters, and it probably would have been fought on

the beaches if they hadn‟t been covered with the breeding

spores of the Wompom at the peak of its birthing cycle.

On Leavenworth Island, there was a smell of foreign

cooking and the sound of very, very high-velocity insects. The

government autodrones were laying suppressing lire down

the high street. Low-calibre anti-personnel rounds at the

moment, but Altoky, the rebels‟ most reluctant, and brightest

- he often suggested that the latter explained the former -

recruit, had suggested that they came supplied with high-

explosive and armour-piercing bullets as well, which made

the rebels‟ current hiding place (behind some industrial-

plastic refuse dumpsters) pretty damn unsafe. Unfortunately

there was nowhere better. The refuse dumpsters were full of

curry from the abandoned restaurant. To‟szmit, the group‟s

leader, remembered that he had planned to take Shurrlanda

there on her birthday before the internments had started and

his posturing teenage rebellion had been forced to become

real.

There were three autodrones, he estimated, white and

silver shadows between him and the sun, each of them a

bundle of proximity-aiming cannons mounted on micro-

antigravity motors. Cheap, dumb and lethal.

His party had been cut off from the main thrust of the West

attack on the government buildings, and he was rapidly

running out of options. Shurrlanda had been hit by raking

fire from one of the drones and her leg was shattered below

the knee. Probably she would never walk again without an

expensive implant. Possibly, despite the improvised splint

that Altoky had slapped on, she would bleed to death. It was

doubly unfortunate that she had been hit because she was

the only one in the group who was a good enough shot to

stand any chance of bringing down one of the drones, thanks

to hours spent on her father‟s Masonic skeet shoots. Also,

To‟szmit realized, he guessed he probably loved her, which

was a bummer under the circumstances, after all those years

of avoiding commitment. He supposed he‟d never expected

his radicalism to be taken this seriously.

Keeping his body in the lee of the dumpster, he crawled

over to her. If she could fight the pain enough to get one clear

shot, well... they would still stand no chance at all, but he

wanted to be near her anyway.

He was almost next to her when the autodrone flew over

the barrier of uncollected poppadoms and whirred its

cannons point-blank in his face. He was close enough to

touch the recently painted government insignia on its side.

He was dead!

The autodrone burped, twitched, switched magazines to

high-explosive, and sprayed what looked like raspberry

soufflé out of its weaponry, first in a gush, then in an

incontinent dribble. In the sky, the other two drones were

shooting at each other with a mixture of armour-piercing,

neoteflon-headed, depleted uranium shells, and other

squishier bullets. One bounced near Altoky and he prodded it

with his foot. To‟szmit saw the youngster bend down and pick

it up. He held it under his nose. He bit it.

„Cough candy. Bullet-shaped cough candy.‟ He looked as if

he needed to validate the experience, to be told that it really

did make sense.

To‟szmit started to laugh. It had been so easy to escape

alive - all he had needed to do was to go mad.

It was only when Shurrlanda slapped him silly, and he saw

what the raspberry gloop was doing to her leg, that he

realized he was even madder than that.

Administrator Sanok Vawn pulled at his greying hair and

screamed at his underlings. „If I‟d wanted mechanisms that

flew up to people and made them better, I‟d have strapped

rocket motors to a team of surgeons. These things are

supposed to be killers, not hovering first-aid stations.‟ His

accent, lower-class than those of the other members of the

party, never raised so much as a smile these days, and that

was just how he wanted it. It had been a hard road from

security guard to leader of the East Faction, and harder still

to gain a role in the administration itself; it would be hardest

on anyone who reminded him of it.

He tore through a sheath of newssheet reports. „Autodrone

saves puppy from drowning. End-Indenture terrorists

brought tea and toast in government breakfast-in-bed

scandal. Autodrone was my lover, says sexy separatist

Samanvra Vulpina, 38, 24, 38. Where the hell is this crap

coming from. Earl?‟

„The terrorists are putting out their own broadsheets from a

captured autolit facility on Alcatraz Peak,‟ his blond assistant

said, hastily. „They, erm, plop straight out of hydraulic

delivery tubes into the colony kitchens, just like official

bulletins. We can‟t cut the tubes if we still want to get our

version of events on to their breakfast tables.‟

Sanok looked up at heaven with the air of someone

surrounded by ninnies. „I suppose there‟s some jimdandy,

stupid, dumbarse reason why we can‟t just bomb it. I mean

stop me if I‟m being too subtle here.‟

„It‟s part of the Alcatraz Dam, sir. Don‟t you remember we

had all that trouble over planning permission, back before

the coup, and you said that the public didn‟t care about

nature‟s grandeur if they knew they were going to get working

radar ovens and a nicely pressed newssheet in the morning?‟

„Snort it up, Earl. You‟re not paid to tell me what I said. So

the rad-excon, West separatists are thumbing their snotty

noses at us from plum-bang atop our primary power supply.

OK. So what are we doing about it?‟

Earl Monet winced. „Well, one of our tech ops managed to

run a databomb up the feedlines in the hope of blowing out

the autolit‟s printing arrays. It wasn‟t absolutely successful. I

understand it‟s one of those heavily armoured Maxwell-

Murdochs. But it did jam the mechanism on to “low-brow

tabloid”. Nobody takes it seriously as propaganda. I‟ve even

seen copies up in the Senate Rooms.‟

„Yeah, and I bet you‟ve seen Senators laughing at it too.‟

Vawn‟s voice was fast and angry. He towered over his little

assistant, hands clenched. „You know what they‟re laughing

at, boy? They‟re not laughing at some dumbcluck rebel

spewing out gutter trash. They‟re laughing at us for not

preventing it. They‟re laughing at the party. They‟re laughing

at me.‟ His gun was in his hand quite suddenly. His finger

squeezed the trigger. He got through more sniffy college-brat

personal assistants that way, but what the heck – bullets

weren‟t in any short supply.

Then an autodrone flew threw the window, deflecting the

bullet with its armoured underside. Unfortunately, Earl

Monet had fainted, so he missed the drone washing the

leader‟s mouth out with carbolic soap.

Dellah: one week and six days ago.

„So what do you propose to pay me?‟ Bernice asked, when the

angel had finished his demonstration.

Clarence smiled a smile that had made her cease to doubt

that he had possessed, once at least, if not any longer, an

intellect vast and cool and unsympathetic. Christopher Lee

briefly elbowed James Mason out of the way.

„God has explained to me that it has simulated you as a

subset of its processing capacity. A very, very tiny subset,

naturally.‟

„Oh, naturally,‟ Bernice said, stung.

„Take no offence - even a simulacrum of myself as I was

would be a very very tiny use of God‟s mentality.‟

„Bigger than me though.‟

„Well obviously.‟

Clarence ran his human socialization routines again. The

professor seemed to be taking offence at something, but he

couldn‟t quite tell what. He had no desire to offend her: he

found her intriguing for a protoplasmic intelligence. Not that

he had anything against protoplasmic intelligences – after all,

he was one himself now. The social checklists creaked in the

morass of wetware damp inside his skull and he had to slop

speaking for a second, to let genuine sincerity upload itself.

This crippled existence was irksome in the extreme. Poor

Bernice. She had always lived like this.

„It‟s not intended as an insult. More an honour if anything.

Shows God thinks you are worth thinking about.‟ Internal

memoranda programs reading, „You‟re digging yourself in

deeper here, kid‟ started to blip on the inside of his blinking

eyelids.

„Anyway, it‟s what has been thought that should interest

you. The simulacrum, as perfectly you as God‟s knowledge of

you permits, working without the distractions of field trips,

has been writing on your behalf. Simply agree to take part in

the Canopus expedition and report your findings and I am

authorized to give you the text of your next book, exactly as

the simulacrum produced it. Just think: all the benefits of

authorship without the pain of composition; and yet you may

be assured that it is your ideas and scholarship that are

being perused by your peers, not those of some mere

ghostwriter or hack.‟

„Clarence,‟ Bernice had said, finally, „I think I should have

called you Lucifer, but you have a deal.‟

2

MURDER MUST ADVERTISE

The Hotel Hesperon, No Prior Claim (Yed Prior X): one week and five

days ago.

The walls wore plush with the plumpness of cherubs‟

bottoms in the more suspect Old Masters, and the sound of

flesh being shipped did not even get as far as the steel door

before being gently harmonized away by sculpted resonances.

When a pinstriped flunky stuck his head under the armpit of

the hulking deaf and dumb masseur and hissed, only the

pure mass of Francine‟s body stopped her jumping with

shock. Damn it, the door must have opened as silently as a

door in a B-movie SF historical where the whoosh had been

lost in editing. She‟d have to get the management to add a

squeak.

„Madam, you must listen to me,‟ the beetle warbled.

Francine Mondesfiore swore under her breath and turned,

with amazing effort, the dead weight of her head by a few

degrees. Her hangover, half Vasst jag, half Yed beer binge,

made the little beetling servant loom op like a bug under a

magnifier. The flunky‟s stripes were natural to the Yed

species and denoted, with the artificial highlights that took

most of his exorbitant salary, an extremely good matrimonial

catch indeed. His voice had the shaky timbre of someone who

has just bet a lot of credits owned by someone else on one

spin of a gambling wheel.

Under the strong hands of the faithful Gunter, Francine‟s

body quivered with impact and anticipation. It had been a

while since anyone had dared to interrupt one of her

sessions. The humming of the aircontour 3000 vibrobed

shook her reply into a gasping, „What is it?‟

Someone‟s hit Michel Klarkov - slit his throat with razor

wire and left him nose down in an office INST-MAT copier,‟

The beetle stuttered. „Every distributor of Vasst in the Nine

Systems has been sent a copy of his face printed on poorly

repro‟d flesh.‟

„Shit! Who knew he was running Vasst for us?‟

Pinstripe shrugged - a complex ripple of six arms badly

mimicking the human gesture. He was too scared to show

aspect, and Francine wondered if that should scare her.

When the crime families lose respect, her father had always

said, it was only a matter of time before the simps, the

dogoodniks, and the normos ran their moral majesty crud

over everything. Poor Papa. She wondered if he had eaten his

bread and water today. Sometimes he resisted for a while. He

had the will for a hunger strike but he had never yet carried

it through.

She thought hard. „Get the labs to run the next batch

through to Klarkov‟s contacts uncut. Pure Vasst will destroy

most of them before they can be mind-probed. Then cut that

supply chain cold turkey and reroute the stuff via

Kelmonica.‟ It would mean payments to the Hard Thursday

Terrorists but it would be worth it to keep the higher-profile

markets in the core systems open.

Pinstripe nodded.

Then get People‟s Commissar Husarof on line and get him

to close Klarkov‟s office on a morals charge. Nominally the

Commissariat has authority over the Political Council on

matters of personal turpitude. It may just stir up enough

political questions to give us time to get Klarkov‟s bank

accounts wiped dry.‟

„You think he‟ll do it? The murder of a planetary

councilman‟s pretty big cookies.‟

Husarof‟s had more than enough free brain candy and

groin liposuction from us. I‟ve got enough on him to have the

neopuritans whipping his buttocks until they fall off.‟

Pinstripe did his bobbing nod again.

„Then get anyone who isn‟t doing that, and find out who

killed Michel. I want bollocks on fried bread for this.‟

Pinstripe hesitated. „I don‟t ask twice,‟ Francine snarled.

„They say it was a Ninjucoid killing, madam,‟ Pinstripe

stuttered.

„They say, they say.‟ Francine heaved herself up. „They said

that when my father disappeared. They say that when it

rains on St Dismas‟ Eve. A Ninjucoid did it, a Ninjucoid did

it. Why do they say it this time?‟

„Mainly because of the signed confession,‟ Pinstripe said,

dancing backwards as if fearing physical assault.

„What did it say?‟ Francine roared. God, but they were all

stupid. She had done Papa a favour taking over this bunch of

dungfeeders.

Pinstripe read from a strip of what looked like pinkish

parchment. Francine realized what the confession must have

been copied on to and grinned slowly. You had to admire that

sort of thinking.

„This assassination carried out by a Ninjucoid Version-99

Assassin. Lessee remaining anonymous. You too can invest

in all that is most up to date in mutogenic homeotropic

wetware by accessing CRIMESAFENET-ASSASSINS-R-US in

the next twenty minutes.‟ Pinstripe squinted. „And a logo of a

body with a knife in it.‟

Francine let out a long breath. „They‟re bloody real then.

Who‟d have thought it?‟

„They say they can mimic anyone. Isn‟t that so, madam?

Get a fragment of DNA and force-grow a body round

themselves, quick as slapping on a survival suit. They say

they know ninety-seven ways to kill using only St Dismas‟

Eve decorations.‟

„They say far too much.‟ The new voice was deep and

amused, and for a heart-stopping second Francine thought it

was her father, and then the large hands of her always

faithful masseur closed on her neck and broke it.

* * *

The hulking masseur smiled at the panicking Pinstripe. „But,

you know what? It‟s all true.‟ It carried its bulk less

realistically now, and some of the muscle groups were losing

definition. There were more efficient muscles underneath, but

they did not look like anything you could get from good

honest megasteroids and a complete lack of a social life. They

looked squeamishly organic in the way that only really high-

class mechanical things can.

Squeaking, Pinstripe ran for it.

An annoying clause in the current contract popped up red

and glowing in the Ninjucoid‟s sensorium. It said let Pinstripe

go; so it did. The client didn‟t want the crime family destroyed

- only a clean surgery of the present control structure. Well

so be it. It expanded a scribing tool from its right hand and

began to leave its advertising message.

„This assassination carried out by a Ninjucoid Version-99

Assassin. Lessee Papa DuVal Mondesfiore. You too can invest

in all that is most up to date in mutogenic homeotropic

wetware

by

accessing

CRIMESAFENET-MURDER-

INCORPORATED in the next twenty minutes.‟

Dellah: one week and four days ago.

Bernice was packing. The technical preliminaries were out of

the way after a hasty confab with her supervisor that left her

smelling like a fresh swimming bath from the chlorine-laced

atmosphere in his hipbath-sized office, so now she could

concentrate on getting her equipment and clothing under the

expedition‟s tight weight allowance. If she couldn‟t squeeze a

multispectrum analysis rig into the general cargo

dispensation she was going to be wearing stout boots and

thin silk knickers at this rate. At least Clarence wasn‟t

coming with her. His wings would have filled her cargo space

on their own.

In the background the holovision flared. Bernice had

dragged the barely watched Wiesel X15 out from under the

cocktail cabinet, and kicked it until the dodgy discriminator

was working well enough to take oral commands. It was

audio-visual

wallpaper

to

that

most

pressing

of

archaeological problems: hot pants versus chinos for off-dig

wear.

She had set the discriminator to hop the wavebands

looking for any matches with the text of her book that

Clarence had just happened to pick to read out. Bernice had

never placed much faith in coincidence, especially not when

applied to angels.

The set fizzed and fluttered through the dozen or so

networks that could be picked up on Dellah, SNN, BXB, and

so on, and eventually it beeped out a few curiously carved

pieces of flotsam from the scrimshaw of popular culture.

The first item to be remotely interesting was from Know

Your Predators, a so-called citizen crimewatch programme,

broadcast on BXB Public Access Hyperband 1. Really it was

full of plugs for the latest Megacorporate antitheft systems

and personal armour. Its presenter was a swarthy geek with

a suspicious beard. Bernice had seen it once before and

suspected that they stuck it on just before he went on air.

The geek was all oily sympathy as his voice spilt out of the

set.

„The following gangland murder was reconstructed from

audio-visual and psychographic recordings taken by the

room where it occurred. The management of the murder site

- the Hesperon Hotel at Pinochan‟s Bay on the world of Yed

Prior X (colloquial name: “No Prior Claim”) approximately one

hundred and forty light years from Earth in the winter

season - are now also under investigation for prostitution,

blackmail and personal-data-protection offences. Viewers

may remember that the après-sex suite of the Hesperon Regis

Hotel - recently featured on SNN‟s travel show. Wish Yourself

There - was widely regarded as a must-share experience for

jaded debauchees. The sensoramas of the suite are carefully

arranged to give all the sensations that are generally felt just

after sex without any of the awkwardness or medical risk of

actually having had it. The experience is particularly prized

by neopuritans who want to be able to say “was that it?”

without risking either their souls or their health. Rumours

that a parallel service for masochists is available in the “Oh

God I Feel So Cheap” Room are generally denied by the hotel,

but some tourists suspect this is solely because the word

cheap in the room‟s title might Inn in the hotel‟s image.

Brochures for the Hesperon were available from Afterglow

Inc., now in receivership.

„The reconstruction is coming right up. Remember, violent

crime is in fact statistically rare in the central sectors: but if

you recognize the killer in this incident, you should not

approach. Ninjucoid Assassins are labelled Ultra-Violent and

Top Danger by the Trans-System police.‟

Bernice nearly told the remote to click on. She was looking

for references to the Vo‟lach, not Ninjucoids – though she had

referred in passing to the myths about them in her book.

Then the pressing need to locate three missing socks

distracted her, and she let it run on.

The word RECONSTRUCTION strobed over every three-D

surface, flat and distorted.

Bernice watched after a while with startled intensity. Some

things needed to be seen to the end to ensure that they didn‟t

remain in the system. This was one of them.

When it was over she tightened up the discriminator to

read the word Vo‟lach only, and finished packing, half as

many clothes and twice as much data as her detractors

might have guessed.

The next show to trigger the discriminator caught her

attention though. It was the premier strange-but-true show

on the hyperbands at the moment, introduced by a muscular

babe with a big gun. It was very popular with the male

members of her tutorial group for two very prominent

reasons, three if you counted the gun; but it was also pretty

damn hilarious. The story about the bread roll that looked

like President Murtangi‟s colon, or the extremely rude crop-

circles of Priapus IX, or the serial-killing sea serpents of

Leviathan Major were still making their way around the

college after last week‟s show, getting even stranger with each

retelling.

The show was called Ripley’s Believe It Or FO! and it was a

big cult on campus.

The presenter, neither as blonde nor as dumb as she

looked, pouted into shot in spray-on leatherwear. She was

carrying a gun so big that it had its own antigrav units.

Bernice decided that if the presenter‟s high heels snapped

she‟d be left hanging from the gun. It was almost worth

watching just in case that happened.

If the crimewatch presenter‟s voice had been oily, hers was

a full massage.

„All over human-explored space, or at least over that

fraction of it covered by the major news networks, wars are

getting out of hand - but in good ways.‟

A quick montage of news footage showed perfectly normal

devices - devices built with loving care to eviscerate, maim,

spindle, mutilate or vaporize - walking dogs, constructing fire

breaks and, in one extreme case, collaborating with other

weapons to build a one-to-twenty-four-scale replica of a

steam locomotive in the bathroom of the Tyrant of Barnard‟s

Star. Surprisingly it did not look faked.

„Today an embarrassed peace hangs over the battlefields of

a score of worlds like a sick headache after a particularly

violent office party.

„We went to Mechanista-A-GoGo, the funky company that

specializes in android death machines, to ask: should we

believe it or FO?‟

The Mechanista-A-GoGo representative was a harassed-

looking eight-year-old. He probably had no more than two

good years left in the weaponry cartel business. It was a

truth universally acknowledged by military cyberneticists

that only the very young really intuitively understood the

most modern advances in computer science. Consequently,

the war business recruited its best „deathmaster‟-class

experts from the under-eights. Ideally they should also have

come from broken homes and lack empathic socialization,

but only the really top-class, the so-called „Violent

Elizabeths‟, met those criteria.

„We‟ve been up long past our bedtimes, trying to unravel

this one,‟ he said absentmindedly tugging at his nightshirt

sleeves where mittens hanging on cotton threads looked like

spare hands. „It‟s got us foxed. We‟ve had to ship in extra

consignments of drinks with bright orange food colouring,

hut even so we‟re dropping like toddlers in there.‟

„What exactly is wrong with the weapons in question?‟

Ripley asked.

„Who knows. They‟re all too simple for spontaneous AI node

formation. I mean Pavlovian simplicity. If it looks like this,

destroy; otherwise do not destroy. Not much scope for

subtlety there. It seems an impossible problem.‟ He sniffed. „I

want my mummy.‟

„Is there anything the weapons have in common?‟ Ripley

asked, patting the boy on the head consolingly.

„Well, they‟re ninety-five per cent Vo‟lach-made, but that‟s

not surprising - the Vo‟lach have built a military supply

empire on at least a thousand years‟ worth of known absolute

reliability. No one else has ever been able to sustain

competition with them in their core markets.‟ He looked

worried. „I hope this isn‟t going to be another Long Peace.‟

Ripley turned to the audience.

„So there it is. For no known reason weapons are going

pacifist on their angry masters. It looks like the Vo‟lach are

responsible but they have no maintenance teams, no

aftersales service, no hyperwave lines locked on hold with

Hoist, Wagner, and Justifiable Ragnarok playing. They have

never needed them until now. Until today they never had a

disgruntled customer. So is the complete absence of any

aftersales infrastructure, or indeed any known way to contact

them at all, an oversight or an astonishingly innovative

business practice? And is this all true? We say believe it or

FO!‟

From the diary of Professor Bernice Summerfield

Well, the rest of the day is frankly a bit of a blur, but I think I

earned my place on the expedition just from my skill in

talking Dr Follett into letting me skip out for another field

trip, and my ability to fit three weeks‟ clothes and an

archaeological lab into one suitcase.

The nominal head of the expedition under the actual ship‟s

captain, the captain being, I guess, the representative of the

sponsors - although no one is actually saying so - is

Malkovitch Fellows, who holds the Daedalus Chair of Applied

Physics. I was quite prepared to be chummy, but he made it

clear that he regards me as an encumbrance and that if I

hadn‟t got pull with Farouk, his head of department, he

wouldn‟t be letting me shoehorn myself in like this. I got the

strong impression that if Farouk had been left on Perfecton

when its sun went nova. Fellows would have been able to

keep his grief down to a seemly level.

It will take a week plus to reach Canopus IV. It‟s going to

be a long voyage.

Extract ends

In orbit around Canopus IV, on board the starship Second-Best Buy:

the present.

It did look, from space, like a dusty pinkish orange with the

tip of a knitting needle sticking out of it. Appearances can be

destructive to the imagination. It was almost impossible to

grasp that the orange was a planet, and the needle was a

building. The planet was roughly three-quarters the size of

Earth, a little under 9,500 kilometres in diameter at the

equator. The building was visible from space. That could not

be emphasized enough, Bernice thought, so she said it again

to herself with capital letters, underlining and a fancy font. In

the earlier days of Earth spaceflight they had said that the

Great Wall of China was the only human-created structure

visible from space. A thin white line across a continental

mass seen from close orbit could not match the scale of this

vertical point plunging out of the equator, catching starlight

on its razor edge. She did not have to feign being impressed.

The thing had to be three hundred kilometres high, at least.

„Three hundred and forty-four point nine kilometres to be

exact, Professor.‟ The thin tones of the expedition‟s leader

insinuated themselves into her ear, and she had to accept

that she had, without meaning to, spoken aloud. „That‟s two

hundred and fourteen pre-EU-standardization miles to you,

my dear.‟ Bernice smothered a wince - trust that patronizing

little git, Malkovitch Fellows, to take a great movie-opening-

sequence moment and turn it into university infighting.

Nobody used miles any more, not even historians and

archaeologists. Fellows was just showing off his flimsy

erudition. Not content to be a physicist, he was well known

for wanting to keep a toe in every other discipline on the

campus.

„Fascinating,‟ she said - po-faced - and turned the tables by

asking with every appearance of innocence, „What‟s it made

of?‟

Malkovitch Fellows twitched slightly. „We don‟t bloody

know, do we?‟ he spluttered. „I thought that was the whole

point.‟

You may not know, Bernice thought with satisfaction, but

then you‟re not on the side of the angels.

Canopus IV

The clawed hands with which Tenomi laid his vestments to

one side were blotched with the scars of Gath fever. His

lingers shook as he placed the robes in the chest of scented

wood. Ordinarily he would have had servants to help him

disrobe, but he had ordered them away since the first onset

of the illness. When death came his body would be embalmed

in the prescribed manner and displayed in the outer

chambers of the Spire, under its vast central arch, and then

idle fellows and gossiping broodwives would be able to see

the wounds that the disease had made on his flesh. Until

then, he still had his pride.

A bitter, spicy tang stung his narrow nostrils. The chest

was made from the wood of the trees of Aludren, which had

grown on the hill behind his house when he was fresh out of

the eggwomb. He would never sec the forests of the south

islands again or smell the pollen of their trees. Soon he would

go down into the grey lands to mourn with his parents.

A stab of pain from his wrist drew him back from the grey

future, and he pulled queasily at the scabs on his left fore-

arm. The fever was invariably fatal. Even in the great

buildings that huddled around the Spire, there was no

escape from the infection. Carried by the omnipresent

parasitic beetled that infested pilgrims and their sandstriders

alike, the plague struck down folk from all estates: priest,

noble or landsman. It respected no person and no title.

Tenomi III, Priest-King of the Spire, hierophant, seer, and

Scribe of the Gods, had at best a fiveday to live.

The one consolation of his position was that the fever

would bring a mild and gentle death. For him there would be

none of the agony of those brought down in war or family

feuds. Instead the temperature of his blood would pass a

point of no return and crucial chemical components of his

brain tissues would change their state. He had begun a

journal of his sensations in the hope that they might

elucidate some of the obscurer prophesies. Surely somewhere

in the welter of nonsense and madness that poured down the

Spire from the future, there would be something as simple

and practical as a cure for the fever.

Thus did the Gods care for their children, Tenomi thought

bitterly. In the meditations of Tenomi I, the fourth book on

the second shelf of the eighteenth rack of the Great Library,

the vectors and symptoms of the fever were perfectly

described, a full thirty years before the first case reached the

northern nations. In the hundred and nine years since, the

disease had reached its grand climactic year on three

occasions. As yet the Gods had not cared to reveal its cure.

Sometimes Tenomi doubted the Spire was anything to do

with the Gods at all.

Sighing, he toyed with one of the scrolls of prophesies that

he had been quoting from in the service. It was one of the

rare prophetic texts in that the events it depicted were dated;

so much that filled the minds of the priests in their dreams

was vague or, if clear, was forbidden knowledge, but this was

plain and simple. He had chosen it for his discourse in the

temple because of that, and because the proof of it would be

determined within the likely span of his remaining lifetime.

Either it would come true today or it would be consigned to

the lire pits, with the other prophesies that had proven false.

Tenomi ran a shaking claw under the red hieroglyphs: „On

the day of the Catchal Festival, in the eleventh year of my

second namesake, strangers will come to barter and will open

the way to the secrets of the Gods and their children.‟

3

DARK AND STORMY LIGHT

From Mr Misnomer And The Polar Peril. Editor’s note: the

uncharacteristic exclamation ‘Yowling cataclysms’, here attributed to

one of Mr Misnomer’s aides, suggests that this text was produced by a

different autolit facility than that responsible for the main run of the

series. Its canonicity is therefore doubtful.

Deftly, Mr Misnomer stitched the transparent thread through

the innards of the computer. His long surgeon‘s fingers

spliced the nanoscopic connections with practised ease.

Fizzing and spluttering, the autopilot of the crashed skimmer

sprang to life.

‗Yowling cataclysms, boss!‘ Captain Jacob ‗Yeti‘ Yetiovitch,

one of his seven trusty aides, ejaculated. ‗Where‘d you get the

material to mend the pilot in this arctic wasteland?‘

Mr Misnomer smiled. ‗There was one thing Herr Doktor

Harbinger overlooked. That the fur of the common polar bear

has remarkable fibre-optic properties...‘

‗Jeez, boss. While I was unconscious, you hunted down

and killed a bear with your bare hands in the dead of arctic

winter with nothing but your battle vest between you and

hypothermic death?‘

‗Certainly, not,‘ Mr Misnomer said, shocked. ‗The polar

bear, unlike the insidious Doktor Harbinger, is no enemy of

mine.‘ Deftly he patted the pocket of his battle vest, which

housed the tiny electric razor he had built from the parts in

his ultimatility belt. ‗The specimen in question, a full-grown

male, should soon replace a small patch of hair. I also

removed a small precancerous cell cluster by way of

payment. That bear should outlive us both!‘

Extract Ends

Bernice flung down the text, irritated. Usually the hyperbole

and melodrama of the pulps provided her with some degree

of amusement, but not even Mr Misnomer‘s chilly

predicament could get her mind off her own problems right

now. Mr Misnomer would always triumph, but there would

never be mi escape for him from his world of mechanical

karma, in which the next disaster, nuclear extortion, or

invasion of parallel-universe meta-termites was only a page

away; not for him the resolutions of marriage or death, of

tragedy or comedy. It wasn‘t even a real story, she thought

sourly with unusual vehemence, just a sequence of mythic

elements produced by a fairly primitive action-thriller-text

kaleidoscope program that used Burroughs‘ cut-up

techniques and primal-plot archetypes to endlessly recycle

the traditional passion play of Good Guys versus the Men In

Black Hats. That was her problem, in a pun, of course:

irresolution.

She reached for her diary.

From the diary of Professor Bernice Summerfield

Well, I guess I‘ve done it now. Talk about selling your soul.

I‘ve been sorry since I made planet-fall here, and the

perpetual sandstorms haven‘t helped. I‘m writing this in my

quarters at expedition ground-zero, which is to say, in a fairly

standard automatic self-erecting survival tent, in a wadi just

above the equator. Outside you could etch without

equipment: the liquid precipitation that started after the first

half-hour of the sandstorm has the pH of barely diluted

hydrochloric acid. But at least in here the constant impact of

silica and acid rain – the piddle of the sands, you might call it

- on the layered pseudo-canvas of the tent is reduced to the

merely maddening.

Really I should be researching, but instead I‘ve been

looking at the tent, and worrying about my bargain with

Clarence. The tent is the largest accommodation module the

expedition had, although the lab and mess facilities will be

larger when fully extended. Incidentally, it‘s the only

expedition tent with a double bed. I hope that doesn‘t mean

Malkovitch has designs on my body. Oh, I suppose he means

well, but what a zoonie. I know I don‘t usually dabble in

twenty-second-century slang, but really there‘s no other word

for him. Besides, even if he was a human splicing of the

genes of Calvin Klein IV, Herakles, and the winner of last

year‘s Sex Olympics‘ Traditional Mixed Doubles, I‘m in more

of a morbid self-pitying mood than a rumpy-pumpy one.

I think I‘ve been sold a pig in a poke, and that I‘m it.

How could I have been so easily bought? Of course, I was,

stuffed both ways, as the turkey said to the colonel. If I didn‘t

agree to come on this expedition then I‘d probably never get

to see what God thinks I would have written, then I‘d have to

wonder what it was for ever. No question but that I would

too. I‘ve got that sort of brain. It goes with archaeology, and

God knows that even without a simulation.

Having agreed, I have to face up to the fact that I will get to

see it, and then what? Well, that‘s a very good question. If it‘s

what I would have written anyway then I might as well get

God to ghostwrite my life and go and suck my thumb in a

corner. I wonder how the People cope? It‘s bad enough

getting that feeling that comes sometimes in the middle of the

night that there is nothing, simply nothing, that you can do

that cannot be done better by someone somewhere in the

galaxy. It must be worse to know that the person also looks

in every so often to check the biosphere, fix the toaster, and

offer friendly advice. Yet they seem so sane. Possibly you

have to be brought up with it.

It may be irrational, it may be my upbringing – military

orphanage, self-taught archaeologist, galactic traveller and

part-time troubleshooter, finally real professor at a real

university, with, unfortunately, real colleagues - but I don‘t

feel happy knowing that God thinks - or that it is purported

that God thinks - that it can just turn me on when it likes in

its mind.

I suppose I feel that, if I can be simulated by God, then I

can be reduced to an autolit engine, and that, if so, anything

I write can be divorced from its logical origins in my

experience and be perceived as being of as little literary merit

as the common view of the Mr Misnomer pulps. Now, logic

tells me that if what I would have written would have been

worth leading, then it would remain worth reading even if it

had been produced by a subset of an alien artificial

intelligence. Hut I just don‘t accept that inside, logic or not.

Besides, and I his raises a fresh wave of existential angst, if

God had successfully simulated me, why would it stop?

Extract ends

Bernice stopped writing. The answer, ‗because you are

basically of no interest to God whatsoever, and when it has

what u wants it‘ll just turn you off, and - click - another

Bernice will be a white dot vanishing on a million

metaphorical holovision screens‘, popped up in her mind, but

she beat it back. Some things don‘t get into the diary, ever.

It‘s one level of honesty never to erase what does reach it,

only Post-it-noting over with preferred versions, but she did

not kid herself. No one writes down all the froth and anger,

all the bric-a-brac and heirlooms, all the detritus of the head,

that even the sanest of us carry about from day to day.

Diaries don‘t come that big. She resolved to finish the entry

later.

From the diary of Professor Bernice Summerfield - continued

Or, rather, what if it didn‘t? It would mean that I could never

be sure that somewhere in a foreign God there wasn‘t a patch

of pseudo-neurons that were forever Benny. It has enough

processing capacity to sustain whole worlds, and this raises

Paranoid Frontal Lobe Removal Headache Number None:

since simulating me at all implies simulating the simulation‘s

total apparent sensory input, how do I know that I‘m not the

simulation now. It‘s no help that I don‘t think I feel like a

computer program - how would I know that how I feel isn‘t

how one feels?

I suppose, because I haven‘t finished the book, that I can‘t

be. Definition by failure is as good a test of organic life as

anything, I suppose. At least, it will do.

Where was I? Ah, yes...

Then, if I get to see this book - even if I don‘t give in to the

temptation to plagiarize my own doppelganger‘s output, how

will I be able to second-guess myself and produce something

better.

I hate this.

Here I am within spitting distance of one of the great

unsolved mysteries, so close that I could see it if it wasn‘t for

the sandstorm in between - which is to say we are on the

same continent - and can I get to grips with the findings from

Fellows‘ initial work? No, I can‘t, because I‘m too busy

worrying that a supercomputer in a Dyson Sphere in another

galaxy might be writing my book for me.

I‘m going to get some sleep. In the morning this may be

better.

It had better be.

Extract ends

Professor Malkovitch Fellows locked the focusing control on

the spy scope and passed the tiny optical sensor to Captain I

Sandra Johansen. They had left the encampment and struck

out to the north, relying on magnetic navigation to get them

beyond the storm‘s boundaries. The pink sand and the acid

had pelted on the outside of their survival suits in a way that

Malkovitch had found almost pleasant. It was like the

astringent showers favoured on his homeworld. He had never

got used to water falling freely from the air on Dellah. Most

unhygienic. He was so glad to be back in the field, and away

from Professor Farouk, his nominal superior in the

university‘s science department.

Captain Johansen‘s company was welcome too – unlike

that of Bernice ‗Jonah‘ Summerfield. The woman had been a

jinx on so many offworld field trips, that it had got to be

something of a joke. She had also been most uncivil aboard

ship, walking about with her nose in the air and refusing to

take the most elementary interest in the mechanics of the

expedition. When he had tried to correct the archaeologist on

a number of matters of fact, purely with a view to

establishing the scale of the problem facing them, she had

just wandered off to chat to the ship‘s crew, as if there was

no point to the conversation. Goodness knows, he had no

desire to be uncharitable to the woman, but it was hard to

ignore the gossip. Whispers of the sundry fates of other

expeditions that Professor Summerfield had accompanied

had come back to the junior common room, and, while it was

true that no one had actually died, as such, certainly none of

the teaching staff, there was no great clamour to get her

name down on the personnel lists for extracurricular

activities. If Farouk hadn‘t insisted on it he would never have

consented to her presence. As it was he had given her the

biggest tent, and he profoundly hoped that she would be

content to skulk in it.

He had hoped to reserve that tent for himself, and possibly

for the delectable Captain Johansen, whose company had

grown more and more congenial to him since he had first

chartered her ship. Not that he had any evidence that she felt

anything for him other than the slight contempt of the

practical professional for the scientific expert. Still, at least

he could enjoy her company, and her looks. Like Fellows

himself she was dressed in a sand-coloured survival suit -

thin as silk, tough as space armour, too skin-tight for

comfort in a number of ways. His night-vision goggles were

showing interesting patterns on her suit‘s surface and

speculation about what parts of her body were responsible

for which heat spot was starting to steam them up. Fellows

felt that he was getting near some profoundly unfortunate

thoughts. He tried to focus his attention on what Sandra was

looking at, and not on her skin.

‗Now we are out of the storm penumbra you can see the

native buildings around the base of the central pylon. Don‘t

let the scale fool you: some of the earthworkings and keen

are ten storeys high.‘

She grunted, and in Fellows‘ infrared vision the dark lines

of her fair, wispy eyebrows drew together a fraction across

the fires of her face. He knew her well enough to know that

the laconic reaction masked a real impact.

‗They look like ant hills stacked around a skyscraper. How

high is that thing again?‘

‗Radar telemetry puts the apex of the Spire at over three

hundred kilometres above sea level, but there must be a

substantial foundation below ground to anchor its mass. Say

three hundred and seventy kilometres for the total height. It

has to be the single largest, planet-bound structure in

explored space.‘

‗You reckon it was part of a space elevator? Gamoranski

wrote that it might have been a ground installation.‘

Fellows snorted. ‗Some xeno-archaeologists ought to be put

in a sack with a dozen rabid hypotheses and then prodded

with a sharp stick. Helen Gamoranski hasn‘t been any

nearer, here than the beauty parlours in Earth orbit.‘

Sandra smiled. ‗Careful. Your academic jealousy is

showing.‘

‗No, really. Just look at it. You must have studied basic

space construction in your pilot training?‘

Sandra spat on to the hot sand. ‗Never studied, Doc. Flew

bugsprayers over the sea farms on Ordifica as a girl. Stowed

away on a Hotop Company cargo shifter and worked passage

to the Central Stars as a teenager. Didn‘t learn much about

engineering there, although I was under the chief engineer a

fair bit as I recall.‘

Doctor Fellows blushed slightly, his prematurely elderly,

slightly Asiatic features brightening in the infrared.

‗Ah, well, the simplest space elevator requires only an

orbiting component in geocentric orbit and a sufficiently

strong synthetic ―rope‖ reaching down to the planet below, up

and down which cargoes can ride with only a fraction of the

energy expenditure required by reaction or antigravity

methods of reaching orbit. We have one on Dellah. All quite

obvious - the idea predates space travel.‘

He gestured at the vertical line that was bisecting the sky.

‗You don‘t need a vast glowing spike built, according to the

neutrino deflection scans your ship very expensively made for

me, out of an isohedrally clustered crystalline allotrope of an

artificially stabilized high atomic weight clement, with an

internal composition of we-don‘t-know-and-can‘t-find-out-

what.‘

‗ Isohedral what?‘

‗The molecules are wound up into metastable globes.

Carbon 60 is the simplest example. The shape of the

molecules actually changes the apparent properties of the

element.‘

Sandra considered. ‗It stands up because it‘s got balls! Very

phallic. So, what is it for?‘

Fellows‘ brown eyes glinted. ‗No one knows. But the natives

I‘ve spoken to in the villages around the river delta say that

it‘s been there longer than their race has been out of the

eggwomb. They say the Gods built it and went away. And

they say that the priests who live around it can tell the

future.‘

‗What does the company say? I doubt our backers are

interested in local soothsayers. Noun‘s got high-power

chaotic predictors working on the stock-market futures - they

don‘t need no stinking lizards.‘

Fellows bit at his lip inside the survival suit. He wished

that she wouldn‘t speak of the natives in that way. Oh, it was

light-hearted banter: it was a quotation, or at least it

sounded as if it might be one. But even so, it stung. He had

seen on his preliminary, illegal, field trips how hard the

natives worked to claw a living out of the burning sand.

Strictly he ought to upbraid her. She was after all in his

employment. Yes, he would do it. He‘d tell her that the

natives might not suit her tastes, but that he would not have

them belittled. But of course, he didn‘t. He just watched the

interplay of her muscles as she dropped to pick up something

from the sand at her feet.

It was a clear white crystal, about thirty centimetres in

length, and under infrared light its whiteness was shot

through with sparks of fire that almost looked like letters in

an incendiary alphabet.

This is what they want, isn‘t it?‘ she said. ‗Futurite.‘

Under the arch, in the great hall whose ionic columns met in

curves that vanished in the mist of low clouds, the priest

stirred in their meditation pits. Spaced at regular intervals.

the priest holes were of a depth that left the priests‘ mouths

level with the floor. With the original floor that is, for over the

centuries the steady pacing of the clerks in their grey and

yellow vestments had worn down the paths that twine

between the priests until the record-keepers were walking in

deep trenches that left their chests level with the heads of the

priests. Now the square of the thousand mendicants

resembled row upon row of squat volcanoes, each cone the

remaining thickness of the original floor material within

which the dreaming priests were interred.

Ancient steps of rough timber now gave access to the holes

at the apex of each cone. The passing clerks muttered as they

walked, writing the words of the dreaming priests on the clay

tablets that they carried. The clerks were alert for key words,

‗healing‘, ‗cure‘, ‗plague‘.

In one particular priest hole, Geth Kathath stirred in the

grip of a nightmare. In his dream he could see the young

fingers of his right hand, ending in the highly manicured

nails of the priesthood that showed he was considered

exempt from manual work. As he watched, the green enamel

of the nails warped and cracked with age, peeling and falling

away from his flesh.

INTERLUDE

THE BIG, BIG PICTURE

It wasn‘t just the military that wanted the Vo‘lach badly.

Organized crime, too, wanted their intestines - if they had

intestines - wrapped around their native trees. If they had

trees.

When you‘re lying in a pool of your own blood, after a heist

has gone sour, with your arms aching from holding two

chrome Magnum XII lasers in the faces of the punks who

have the drop on you with their gleaming new Vo‘lach Old

Dependable Autofirers, and you suddenly notice with a

precise vision that makes the Buddha nature of the moment

kinda shine through that some kindly saint of hoodlums has

arranged for the manufacturers to neglect to put holes in

their guns‘ barrels, you may be briefly grateful. When you

discover that your Magnums, manufactured under licence,

are similarly impaired and that the punks also have baseball

bats, you get real mad. Mad and bruised. Pretty soon the

Mondesfiore. Von Cataclysm and Red Leopard crime families

were just as mad as the military.

Eventually the news reached someone very well organized

indeed.

The schoolroom had all the charm and simplicity that money

could impart. It looked like it should have had an old fanning

couple standing outside it with the man holding a pitchfork.

It looked rustic - but it stood on a private terraformed

asteroid, and even its gravity was faked up with solar

neutrino-graviton converters under the white maple flooring.

‗This really won‘t do at all,‘ the mathematics tutor said

gently, gown flapping like bats‘ wings. ‗You‘re integrating in

twelve dimensions, when the problem in fact can be simply

solved by a Hilbert space transposition. If you think of the

electron involved in the transposition as a hole in a universe

of negative energy then the zeros cancel out rather nicely.‘

‗Suck off, Grandpa,‘ the sailor-suited pupil sneered.

There was the bacon-sizzling sound of a blaster flaring.

Seb O‘ran shook his head. That was the fifth this week. He

sighed and two muscular men dressed as school monitors

dragged the body away. ‗Now, Morry,‘ Seb said. ‗That just

wasn‘t needful. Was it?‘

The child shrugged, and lowered the smoking novelty-fish

blaster. ‗I‘m sorry, Uncle Seb. These stiffs are driving me

crazy, I guess. Did you listen to that one! Everyone knows

that a Hilbert space transposition involves an assumed

exception to the law of conservation of baryon number.‘

Seb nodded. Morry didn‘t have the family aptitude for

maths, whatever his dad had wanted. He was covering up

well, but shucks, at least he was as good at crime.

Seb ruffled the boy‘s hair, ‗Don‘t fret, son. That was a

pretty nifty shot.‘

‗Yeah, it was, wasn‘t it?‘

There was a groan from the corner of the schoolroom.

‗Uncle Seb,‘ one of the two monitors shouted, ‗the teacher‘s

still alive.‘

‗Never,‘ Seb said, offended. ‗A point-blank energy discharge

like that. It just ain‘t possible.‘

‗He‘s still groaning.‘

‗Well, kick him till he shuts up. Morry here shot him dead,

and that‘s good enough for me.‘

‗Uncle Seb,‘ Morry piped up.

‗Yeah, son?‘

‗Shut up.‘

Seb watched the child‘s head bob up and down with

concentration as he cracked open the service panel at the

side of the blaster. Painfully thin in his sailor suit, his brow

high and furrowed, he looked the image of his ancestors.

Morry scowled as his fingers deftly stroked the blaster‘s

innards: the erikson coil was intact; the inertron sheathing

around the artificially stabilized californium emitter was

undamaged. Sometimes the crystal ruptured, he‘d read years

ago - once - in a trade journal, warping with the fusion

discharge. Not this time. He snapped the parts back together,

snick, snack, snorum, like someone breaking bones. He did

not need to look at what his hands were doing. He had been

given the blaster a year ago. It had been a birthday present.

Every day since then he had stripped it and polished it, and

applied Vo‘lach Wonder Lubricant to its few chrome moving

parts. Its red piranha shape, translucent as blood, swam in

his dreams.

He lined it up. Thumbclicked it to volatilize. On that setting

the beam should rip through the alloy walls of the

schoolroom like a Lorentz-Fitzgerald tessaractic compaction

through Minkowski space, which, he guessed, was pretty

damn fast indeed. That had to kill any teacher. Perhaps he

didn‘t have his ancestors‘ grasp of higher mathematics, but

he had a big gun, and if there was any injustice in the

universe that ought to count for something. Of course, he

knew, in the back of his mind, that if the walls were breached

then he and the others would be breathing vacuum in the

cometary belt, but what the hell. He‘d worked out the angles

on the shot to a nicety.

Seb saw the boy aim the blaster and his old weather-beaten

face went white. Shit in a bucket! That was some trick shot

the kid was planning. He started to shout, knowing that he

was dead anyway. ‗Boss, no. You‘re no good at maths!‘

He got as far as ‗Bos-‘

There was a sound like the fried breakfast to end all fried

breakfasts. It went on for quite a while.

‗Morry.‘ Seb‘s voice was soft. ‗Shit, kid, you going to hose

protons round here like piss round a potty? It just ain‘t

working, and that‘s a fact.‘

Seb‘s big hands came together around the blaster. ―Give it

to me. That‘s right. Don‘t cry.‘

‗I‘m not crying.‘ Morry bit at his Up. ‗I‘m thinking. This may

be symptomatic. Get on to the military and the low crime

families. Find out if they have been similarly inconvenienced,

and offer our services to put things right. While you

negotiate, I‘ll grow a fresh Ninjucoid. One of the new batch, I

think.‘

Seb‘s face went whiter still. The Ninjucoids frightened him.

4

COMMERCE AND VISITATIONS

‗I‘ve seen this in use,‘ Sandra said, balancing the crystal

carefully in her palm. ‗One ship I was on got an eyes-only

package of this stuff. It had vital papers inside together with

an atomic-chip clock, with the packaging time beamed to the

ship separately on a shielded channel as a check. When the

package was opened the clock inside showed the time the

message pod was sealed, caught between one tick and the

next. It showed there hadn‘t been any tampering. A tech told

me that anything wrapped in futurite doesn‘t age. That

right?‘

‗To a degree,‘ Fellows said, scientific exactitude battling

with a desire to be cool. ‗It depends on the purity of the

crystal. Some only retard time flow. One, much darker in

colour, in the University Museum on Noun, actually turns

time back for anything placed inside it. Unfortunately, it‘s

only large enough to de-age material the size of a fingernail.‘

‗This must be pretty valuable, then.‘

‗Oh, indeed. Until the banks of Noun lost the lien on

exploration in a computer glitch, no one had a glimmer of

where this was coming from. Only the very, very top brass in

the bank knew. Hitherto every piece has been hand-picked

from the sands here by scouts working for Noun. Now of

course, with their legal hold on the system lost, other parties

are interested. That‘s why they had to get an official

expedition in quickly. They‘ve a billion good reasons. That

piece alone would probably buy your ship.‘

Sandra whistled, and Fellows wondered exactly how much

of his explanation she had already known. Only the military

could afford to use futurite message pods and she certainly

had the bearing of a soldier. He pushed at the bridge of his

nose, sheepishly, and caught himself doing it. His world had

been poor on resources, and until academic success had paid

for surgery on his eyes, he had needed to rely on clumsy

spectacles. The gesture had become a habit, particularly at

moments of nervousness. Sandra made him nervous.

‗I have persuaded our backers that instead of simply

scooping the stuff up, it might be as well to conclude binding

treaties with the natives for its acquisition,‘ he said to fill the

pause.

‗With those reptiles?‘

Fellows winced.

Hierosarch Mandir shook Geth out of his dream; he held a

clay tablet under Geth‘s nose. Geth gasped to see a member

of the Select acting as a common clerk. Not just an ordinary

member either: Mandir was Tenomi‘s successor – everyone

knew that.

Hurriedly he read the words on the tablet.

‗Arm, weapons, destruction.‘

Mandir smiled at Geth. ‗I think we need to talk about the

future.‘

‗They aren‘t technically reptiles, anyway,‘ Fellows muttered,

sulkily. ‗They bear their young alive. Then they deposit the

placenta and womb in an eggshell, probably originally so the

afterbirth wouldn‘t attract predators.‘

‗Does it hatch?‘ Sandra asked slyly, teasing him.

‗Of course not. Besides, they cat it, and grow another womb

afterwards.‘

‗You‘re having me on!‘

Fellows scowled nervously. ‗It‘s a perfectly sensible

adaptation on the evolutionary cusp between mammal and

reptile.‘ He was perfectly serious. ‗Particularly in a nomadic

environment.‘

She laughed. ‗Thank you, Mr Obstetrician. I suppose you‘ve

a degree in biology as well as astrophysics.‘

‗Three, actually. Human, humanoid, and silicon-analogue.‘

Sandra moved closer, and Fellows felt her breath on the

side of his face. ‗Well you‘ve got a lot to learn about biology,

in my book. Prof.‘

He held up his hand to silence her. ‗Listen.‘

‗I don‘t hear anything.‘

‗Listen harder.‘

A faint pounding reached her ears. A repeated padding,

increasing in speed.

Realization hit her. ‗Shit, sandstriders.‘

‗Get down.‘

Over the dunes, a wild pack of the beasts that the natives

called sandstriders came running, in a cloud of boiling sand.

At rest a sandstrider did not look dangerous. The broad pads

of their feet made them look like the suction-cup toys

children stick to walls. But in flight they were a whirlwind of

bone. Used by the natives for desert travel, they were only

barely domesticated. In the villages to the south where

Fellows had done his preliminary studies - being careful

always to travel towards the Spire faster than native-born

rumour of his alien form could follow - he had seen an

immature sandstrider disembowel a native with one upward

slice of the bony spurs on its knees.

Sandra reached for the compact gun at her belt.

Then the storm of beasts was all around them. A glancing

blow from the yellow barbed limb of a sandstrider sent

Sandra‘s flame gun spinning out of her hand. The impact of

the blow knocked her sideways into the path of another

beast. Fellows flung his arm in front of his face to ward off

the stinging sand and dived for her. The force of his dive

pushed her into a shallow depression in the lee of the dune,

and the splayed foot of a sandstrider smashed into the sand

where her leg had been a moment before. Fellows was aware

of the relative cool of her body through the layers of the

sandsuit. It felt wonderful.

A high screaming filled his head, and he wondered briefly if

a blood vessel was bursting in his brain. The noise could not

be the sandstriders. They had no vocal cords: they

communicated by the coded tempo of their feet on the sand,

lie realized something else. The beats had stopped.

He risked a glance up. The wild herd had been surrounded

by other sandstriders: tame ones. The thin screeching he had

heard had been the hunting cry of the native astride the

largest of the saddled sandstriders. Interesting: the

modulation on the Canopusi‘s vocal cords obviously

encompassed a wider range than their everyday speech

would suggest.

The almost-reptile‘s face was a mask of curiosity.

‗Strangers...‘ it hissed.

Sandra whipped her head around to look at Malkovitch,

her eyes wide with surprise. ‗It‘s speaking our language,‘ she

spluttered.

Malkovitch resisted the temptation to say, ‗Not so primitive

as all that then,‘ and settled for whispering, ‗I don‘t

understand it either. Perhaps some of the Noun futurite

prospectors had contact with the culture, but all my research

has been done with sign language and a typically simplified

trade dialect.‘

In his study room under one of the primary pylons, Mandir

opened a great book bound in sandstrider leather and ran his

long green nails down the pages. Symbols in one of the Ghost

languages - the tongues spoken in visions – adorned the

pages.

Twisting his flexible neck, Geth could see the illustration

that Mandir was pointing out to him.

It showed figures that walked upright, as did Geth‘s race,

but their skin was not scaled, at least not on first sight.

Closer inspection showed that the artist had used beaten

sea-mollusc patina to pick out their skin. Unlike Geth‘s

sensible hide, thick and rugose, built to resist sandstorms,

their skin appeared to be a thin sheet of creased material like

the inner part of a birthing sack. In the illustration the

mother-of-pearl showed it as translucent and through it red

ink depicted blood far darker than Geth‘s own. To make up

for their thin skin, they wore tapestries cut and tied about

their bodies - so cunningly that but for the colours the fabric

might have been taken to be loose scales or thicker folds of

tissue.

‗What creatures are these?‘ Geth hissed.

‗The last hope of the Priest-King. Sadly, your dream makes

me doubt that hope will be fulfilled.‘ Mandir‘s voice was sad.

‗Although I have of course been certain to send out search

parties to ensure that, if any such creatures have arrived,

they will reach the Spire safely.‘

Geth could feel the Hierosarch‘s ambition. He remembered

the names that Mandir had acquired among the priests.

Mandir the heir apparent, Mandir the Lean, Mandir the

Crippled. He wondered if the priests who spoke against him

were correct in their appraisal of him. If they were, then let

the Gods help anyone who got in his way. He wondered if

Mandir‘s men had orders to help any strangers they might

find, or to kill them.

The slick unzipping of molecules and the tearing of pseudo-

canvas woke Bernice from a dream in which she was being

refused extreme unction by a wandering friar, on the grounds

that she was only an idea in the mind of God. The travelling

monk looked suspiciously like Clarence in a surplice.

The orange aliens with the razor-sharp spears were almost

a relief. Reptiles on their hind legs just like in the long-

distance shots in Fellows‘ field studies. The spear tips were

futurite shards. Bernice recognized them from Clarence‘s

descriptions. Pseudocanvas was a complex organic molecule,

one of the Hotop Company‘s ‗Quasiliving Artefacts™‘ but it

wasn‘t built to cope with different time flows. The tent had

just differentially aged to bits.

She realized her face was burning.

‗What

do

they

say

about

me?‘

Mandir

asked,

conversationally, as he closed the ancient book.

‗Who? I mean, I don‘t listen, that is...‘ Geth flustered.

‗The common people, the hoi polloi - to use a term from one

of the Ghost languages - what do they think of me? Fear not,

I am not worried by flattery. You can speak freely here: my

rooms are quite, quite soundproofed.‘

Geth did not find that in the least reassuring. Quite a bit of

what was said about Mandir the Lean was said about what

he did in the privacy of his little quiet stone rooms. All of it

lies, no doubt. Still. He muttered a platitude about Mandir

having the full confidence of the priesthood, but it was clear

that Mandir wasn‘t really listening to Geth, but only to the

rasping of his own disused voice.

‗Ah, no matter, let me tell you. They say that I do not

worship the Gods, that in fact I curse them for my

deformities, for not providing a means in a vision by which

my body could be re-formed whole and fetchingly

proportioned. They say that I am scheming to overturn the

way things are, to abandon the Spire and to grub in the dirt

after truth like a farmer or dive for it in the sea like a

fisherman. They say this of me, who can neither farm nor

fish, of me, who can only hobble a little on my crippled legs.‘

Mandir‘s voice was husky with pain and his eyes were large,

the nictitating membranes across their surfaces drawn taut

and brittle. ‗It is envy, my eggling. Odd as it sounds that a

poor creature such as I might be envied. The Priest-King is

old and ill and I have his favour - consequently I am reviled.

It follows with the pure certainty of mathematics that I must

be evil.‘

His weak eyes glittered. ‗I do not believe I even know what

evil is. Unless it is our sitting at the feet of the Gods like

infants drinking in the thin sour milk they begrudge us,

when all around I see fresh berries of knowledge waiting to be

plucked.‘

Geth listened enthralled. What Mandir was saying was

blasphemy, and yet it touched something in him. ‗When I

was young,‘ he said cautiously, ‗I saw a drop of rain on an

inffun leaf and through it for a moment the web of a

leafgrazer was rendered larger. Ever since my induction into

the Priesthood I have searched for how this might be

accomplished, to render at will the small large, the distant

close. Surely it would be useful in medicine and in art if our

doctors and our scribes could better see their work. I have

even…‘ Geth stared into Mandir‘s deep eyes. It was

melodramatic to think that he was risking his life — Tenomi

wore the Priest-King‘s office lightly and the old laws were

little enforced - but he was certainly risking his permanent

place around the Spire by speaking so freely.

Mandir held up a hand to silence him.

Had he been too bold? The thought of the shame that an

expulsion would bring his family made muscles spasm in his

legs - ghost memories of old flight reflexes in his ancestors

hardwired into his nervous system.

‗You thought that if a piece of translucent stone shaped like

a drop of water could be made then perhaps it might serve to

show the tiny and the faraway as the liquid did?‘

Geth saw that he had pleased Mandir, and he was glad. It

was impossible, now, to believe the lies that people had told

about the Hierosarch.

Mandir reached for another book.

‗This is forbidden, but I think it might interest you. It‘s in a

language that I am informed you know, but some of the

words are blanked from the dictionaries. Ask me if you need

help.‘

Geth looked at the diagrams for a long time.

After a while he asked, ‗What is a telescopic sight, Mandir?‘

A long way from Canopus IV, on another world, a man was

staring at what had been done to his fingernails while a

machine waited for him to react.

His fat face was, the Ninjucoid decided, expressing shock. If

it wasn‘t then his stoicism in the face of the First Celestial

Persuasion was uncanny. An interrogative routine made it

restate its demands, with greater emphasis. ‗Simply tell me

the vectors of the hyperdrive shunt used by the Vo‘lach ship

after your arms deal and there will be no necessity to move

on to other extremities. I use the term extremities in two

senses, you will notice. It‘s a kind of pun. As a newly

activated model, I‘m endeavouring to evolve a sophisticated

wit as part of my cultural infiltration subroutines. After you

have answered my questions I would be grateful if you could

fill in a consumer response questionnaire, detailing whether

or not this experience was sufficiently amusing.‘

‗Then, you‘ll leave me alone,‘ the man said.

The Ninjucoid tentatively characterized his voice as

whimpering, but the match was imprecise. The interrogation

was not going as well as its inbuilt specifications suggested

would be the norm.

‗Most certainly, on my word as a Version 100.‘

‗I don‘t know which way the Vo‘lach were phasing. They

had some kind of hyperresonance mufflers built into their

ship - that‘s God‘s own truth.‘

The Ninjucoid considered. Internal polygraphs, calibrated

against mean and maxima ranges for humanoid stress,

hummed a little true-or-false refrain. ‗That isn‘t good enough,

Mr Vawn. I‘m very much afraid I‘m going to have to cut off

your little finger.‘ Additional arms sprouted from the

Ninjucoid‘s shoulders and fastened themselves around Vawn,

drawing him towards the unit. ‗Not that I am actually afraid,

you see,‘ it continued. ‗I say that because I understand that

empathization with the pain of another is a human trait that

I will need to develop in my mimicry responses. Tell me, did it

make you feel that I was in some way more approachable?‘

‗No, it didn‘t, you mad metal monster,‘ Vawn shouted,

struggling in vain against the impervious musculature of the

Ninjucoid‘s limbs. ‗Let go of me. I‘ve told you the truth.‘

‗It will avail you nothing to struggle,‘ the Ninjucoid said

in accordance with its ‗Stating and Restating the Obvious‘

subroutine. Apparently the near mindless repetition of

certain phrases had a brutalizing effect on humanoid

resistance, particularly when linked to a strobing seven-hertz

microwave bombardment. Its fingers splayed out in a wash of

liquescent metal reforming into whirling brilliant shears.

‗This is only one of a hundred thousand interrogative modes

available to this unit. The Tower of Silence, the Cleft Stick,

the Different Drum, Morton‘s Fork - all these arc still at our

disposal. I can tell that you are a man of inhuman resistance,

but I assure you I will break down your reticence before your

guards can locate us in this abandoned area.‘

There was a noise that was not quite like a carrot being

cut.

‗This is ridiculous,‘ Morry fumed, watching the viewscreen on

the Ninjucoid interface panel mounted inside the raised lid of

his wooden school desk. ‗A version 100, one of the new

batch: fully conversant with every form of torture, brutality

and mayhem listed in the Newgate Calender since 1734 , and

what terrifying means has it picked so far to force this

dictator to spill a potentially lucrative military secret? Eh,

Seb?‘

Seb gulped. ‗A manicure and full nail replacement with

extensions in dusky pink with highlighted edges in rustic

bronze.‘

‗Coupled with?‘

‗Em, a display of ornamental vegetable rosette carving,

using native organic produce. Duodecahedrons mostly.‘

‗Exactly. Now tell me, as head of my operations staff, and

hence the person responsible for the metaprogramming

teams who wrote the parameters for the new batch of

Ninjucoid assassins: just exactly how is this enforced

transvestism and household cookery class supposed to force

the truth from anyone?‘

‗The unit thinks it‘s torturing him. The neuronic feedback

is perfectly clear. It must be being fed false interpretations of

the telemetry signals from its sensors. It knows at the

autonomic level, as it were, that it‘s cutting cucumbers, but

its pseudoconscious insists that it‘s cutting fingers off.‘

‗I know that, Mr Oran. I am not a complete imbecile in

these matters. The question is why, and what are we going to

do about it? No, the question is what are you going to do

about it. I am rapidly losing patience. Uncle.‘ Morry reached

into his desk and produced a very effective-looking knife, and

began pointedly to get chalk dust out from under his

fingernails with the tip. ‗What the hell is an assassin doing

with bodycare and kitchen programs anyway?‘

‗We think the former is part of the femme fatale infiltration

subset.‘

‗Really? And the latter?‘

‗Ninja tea-ceremony preparation. Young Chi Sung

incorporated it in with the martial-arts settings. He‘s

something of a traditionalist.‘

Morry shook his head slowly. ‗I think I‘ve got a headache.

Uncle. I‘m going to go and lie down. Write me a note to

excuse me games this afternoon.‘

Seb shook his head as Morry toddled off to bed. The family

was getting very inbred. His father had never been able to

resist a good games session. Oh well, he‘d just have to make

sure himself that the girls didn‘t go home disappointed.

Skin burning in the lash of the acid rain, Bernice flung

herself back under the covers, not out of childhood fear but

as a temporary barrier against the free skin-stripping

treatment that was bucketing in through the sundered tent,

and scuffled in the bed for her survival suit. Luckily she‘d

been on too many expeditions to leave survival gear out of

arm‘s reach. Now, if only the aliens didn‘t decide to hunt

Bernice-in-a-blanket, she‘d stand some chance of retaining

her eyesight.

Outside she did not hear screaming, but in this storm that

couldn‘t be guaranteed as a good sign.

She‘d got one leg in the survival suit when a claw fixed on

her arm and a strength far greater than a human‘s pulled her

out of bed. She clenched her eyes tight shut and waited for

the acid to eat through her eyelids. Something cold and slimy

slithered across her temples.

Sanok Vawn clutched at his chest. ‗No I can‘t bear it, stop it,

please stop it.‘

The painful racking laughing fit that paralysed him barely

left him room to draw breath.

The Ninjucoid‘s juggling was extremely funny. It was bad at

it, intentionally so, with the badness of a genius for comedy.

The quizzical expression on its human-mimicking face, as it

craned upward on its skinny neck vainly seeking the

twinking dumbbells, was alone enough to crack Sanok up.

The hollow bong of the dumbbells as they fell, almost in slow

motion, on to that gormless face, seemed to sum up the

injustice of the human condition with a poignancy that was

only emphasized by the fact that twenty minutes ago, when

he had woken up to find himself in an out-of-the-way

storeroom with one of the universe‘s most feared assassins,

Sanok had nearly wet himself.

He couldn‘t cope with this. He had been hoping to keep the

destination of the Vo‘lach ship as a card to play if the rebels

were successful, as it seemed all too likely that they might

be. Let me off, boys, and I‘ll tell you where to find the

warmongers who really stirred all this trouble up. A slim

hope, but he‘d survived on lesser chances in the past.

Still they wouldn‘t know that the secret was already out,

would they? And he couldn‘t stand much more of this.

‗It was shielded from an attempt to gauge its course,‘ he

spluttered, ‗but I cheated, got the techs to move a dumbsat

into its wake; it got pulled into hyperdrive when the Vo‘lach

left and fell out a light day further on. From the distance it

had travelled and the direction we were able to guesstimate

the strength and direction of their hyperfield. Assuming, and

it‘s only the first of a chain of big assumptions, that their FTL

drive works like ours, then they were heading for the

Canopus system.‘

Captain Johansen had called her ship the Second-Best Buy

because it had been. That, however, had been a while ago,

and although it was still compact it had been substantially

upgraded since her first days as an independent. In orbit

round Canopus IV it continually scanned near space for

signals that might mean the presence of another ship. There

was nothing sinister in this - it was merely one of the

standard precautions carried out by the automatic systems

of any spacefarer, and might serve the purpose of detecting

any distress call quickly enough to respond as well as any

more hostile or violent reaction. If the detection equipment

was rather too near the top of the range for a commercial

craft with such a self-deprecating name, and, in fact, more

redolent of the military shipyards of the Hotop and Spinward

Companies, that didn‘t necessarily mean anything more than

that the ship‘s owner was unusually prudent in her desires

to know what was happening around her investment at all

times.

With all its neutrino-amplitude-detecting arrays, wide-band

EM spectrum radio telescopes, computer-enhanced parallax

imagers, and devices for detecting such exotic ship

components

as

quantum-theory-predicted

magnetic

monopoles, it was a crying shame that the small black ship

simply flew past it quite undetected.

The Vo‘lach had found another market.

‗Excellent.‘ The Ninjucoid reabsorbed its flaying knives and

its acid-sprayers. It was quite surprised that the human was

still alive, let alone giggling like that. The base-line data

stored in its systems on humanoid vulnerability to painful

stimuli were clearly out of whack. Still, it could rely on its

instructions: find the Vo‘lach traders responsible for the sale

of the useless weapons and make an example of them. A big

radioactive spreading example.

Sanok Vawn watched it go, its sinister stalking gait spoilt

by the still visible juggling dumbbells that were flowing back

into its skin. He took a deep breath, and tried to stop his

hyperventilation.

When the rebels broke down the door of the storeroom an

hour later after their unopposed attack on the Citadel, and

found him with perfect nails, surrounded by exquisite and

dainty salad, even the hardest-hearted of the revolutionaries

realized that he had suffered enough.

After what seemed like an hour of battering and jolts, Bernice

had worked a hand up sufficiently to prise the material

binding her away from her less favourite eye. She opened it a

crack, and saw ground going by below her. The rapid striking

of two massive clawed pads raised dust that obscured her

view, but twisting her head she could just make out that she

was wrapped in what looked like thick seaweed and slung

over the pommel of an elaborate saddle. Looking back, she

could see a train of sandstriders, stretching back under the

dawn sky. The storm seemed to have stopped, or perhaps

they had outrun it while she had been too wrapped up to

notice.

The other members of the expedition, minus two on a quick

count, had been similarly mummified, or at least there were

nineteen bundles. It was of course possible that some

contained goods stolen from their camp. The green bindings

had evidently repelled the rain, or they would have run

steaming into the sand by this time. That might mean the

natives were not killingly hostile, or it might just mean that

they had a sound grasp of the value of alien slaves. Bernice

resolved to wait and see. The motion of the sandstrider

beneath her was giving her solar plexus a pummelling like a

high-pressure workout in three gravities. She didn‘t need any

theoretical worries.

‗Seb.‘ The voice over the intercom interrupted Seb in mid-

stroke. The girl holding his golf bag giggled as his reaction

made him chip a shot out of the sculpted gravity field and

into a low orbit.

‗Yes, Morry,‘ he said hiding his annoyance. ‗What do you

want?‘

‗Meet me in the schoolroom. I think I‘ve figured out a way

to get the Ninjucoid back on track.‘

‗I demand that you take me to see someone in authority,‘

Malkovitch blustered as the natives forced him and Sandra at

spearpoint into a tiny stone room standing on its own in the

desert. A way station of a kind, Fellows guessed. He had

heard of these ‗guest rooms‘, each built around an artesian

well along the pilgrim trail to the Spire.

The Canopusi did not seem intimidated, and it wasn‘t hard

to see why. It was over six feet tall and had a big spear.

Fellows felt like a particularly belligerent beetle. It shut the

thick wooden door of the way station with a no-nonsense

thud, and Fellows heard the hammering of nails from

outside. They were locking them in by fastening planks

across the door.

‗Interesting,‘ Fellows whispered.

‗It does imply preplanning,‘ Sandra said. ‗I don‘t suppose

sandstrider herdsmen normally carry timber about with

them.‘

‗You think they had already selected this way station as a

holding pen, and left the wood here in advance?‘

‗You did say the natives think the priests can tell the

future.‘

‗The priests, yes, not common herdsmen.‘

‗I don‘t think these were common herdsmen.‘ Sandra stared

into Fellows‘ nervous eyes, in such a way that he did not

know whether to think it disturbing or erotic. ‗So, what do

you fancy doing until they bring someone important here to

talk to us?‘

Erotic, he decided quickly. She was definitely coming on to

him. His nerve, however, failed him. He scraped some lines in

the sand. ‗Er, noughts and crosses?‘

Sandra scowled. ‗Jeez, you should get out more.‘

Fellows looked meaningfully at the door. ‗When I can, I

will.‘

From the diary of Professor Bernice Summerfield

We picked ourselves out of the rainproof wrappings in a little

cobbled tunnel. There was absolutely no sign of our captors;

they had apparently scarpered as soon as they had dropped

us off. As far as I could see the gang were all there except for

Fellows and Captain Johansen, and no one was injured.

Antok, a tiny Goll gamma-male, his withered limbs and

emaciated frame supported by silver cyberbraces, was the

most shaken, but even he managed a whirring thumbs up as

his servomotors took up the strain. Modem tech had

detached the Goll gamma-males from their subservient

clinging to their wives‘ abdomen hair but it was still rare to

see one outside of the marital home even in the

nonfundamentalist areas.

I chivied the students together, name-checking a

trustarfarian bubblehead here, a solid A student there. As I

had suspected from the first, most came from Professor

Farouk‘s department; physics, not archaeology, was clearly

the core discipline for this jaunt. The trip out had been

arranged quickly and secretly. It wasn‘t a leisure junket like

the Perfecton Expedition, and I felt sure that everyone there

was there for a specific nonfrivolous reason. Then I saw

Professor Jervis Lochlin and that scuppered that theory. He

must have stayed in his cabin all the way here; I couldn‘t

have missed his raw bulky face with its habitual egg-sucking

expression. What possible reason could there be to bring the

physics department‘s biggest crank on a serious

commercially funded expedition?

Extract ends

The tunnel led two ways but one of them obviously led into

the light. Even a group of academics didn‘t have any trouble

picking that one.

They stumbled into the whiteness.

Bernice gave a little gasp of appreciation as she entered the

hall. The other members of the expedition were gaping as

well. Up above was a mist of white thread girders, and dark

honeycombs of shadow. Perspective failed. It was more like

looking down the axis of a classical O‘Neill orbital colony

than anything in planetary architecture. The roof peeled

away upward on a graceful curve that didn‘t stop. Birds

could have flown in there. Helicopters could have flown in

there. You could have built 1:1 scale models of Saturn 5

rockets in there and hung a selection of them from the

ceiling. Bernice guessed from Menlove Stokes‘s tall tales that

it wasn‘t as big in area as the room on the Us world where

the entire population of the planet had been able to gather;

but it was higher. The roof was kilometres away. They had to

be inside the Spire. Inside a buttress perhaps. Bernice

thought that if she squinted she could make out a slight

incline to the walls.

Well, well, she thought, didn‘t any of the races who strode

across the early history of the galaxy like colossi ever build

anything small?

The scale of the architectonics drove any thoughts of

personal danger straight out of the heads of the pure

academics, who instantly began trying to fit the interior of

the Spire into whatever theory they had concocted in orbit.

The expedition‘s students showed a little more common sense

or fatigue. They gathered in an uneasy group like outsiders at

a university freshers‘ ball, near the tunnel arch they had

entered by, but the professionals, the actual people who

would do the real work of the investigation, split up in an

instant and in seconds were seemingly just about as spread

out as it was possible to get. Bernice gritted her teeth and set

out to do sheepdog duty.

With the myopia of the expert, Elspet Vespatrick, Reader in

Symbolic Languages, a scrawny man with hair that in a good

light might pass for a poor-quality strobe-wig, had his head a

micrometre away from an ornamental pillar and was trying to

take a rubbing with his shirt. ‗Look at this,‘ he chortled as

Bernice wandered over, nodding to the groups of bemused

expedition members. ‗Two separate sequences of symbolism

in conflict. Thesis and antithesis in a single work of art.‘

‗No handy drawings, briefly charting the history of the

planet with the major high points repeated as leitmotifs in

each room?‘ Bernice asked. The ruins in Antarctica had

spoilt some archaeologists, and she wasn‘t really expecting

this to be a similar site, but it was as well to rule out the

obvious.

‗Sadly no,‘ Elspet said beaming. He was constitutionally

unable to be upset by anything, and on the outward trip to

Canopus, Bernice had decided that he was about the most

congenial of the staff attached to the expedition. ‗But I think

we can conclude that the builders were faced with an ongoing

conflict of some kind. The symbol of the red circle with the

outward arrows is shown occluding or driving out of the

pattern this bluish-coloured, wobbly, asymmetric circle. They

could be sects or tribal markings.‘ He smiled. ‗Or planetary

orbits. I wonder if there have been any inter-planetary near

misses in this world‘s recent history.‘

Bernice snorted. Elspet‘s imitation of Professor Jervis

Lochlin, whose obsessive interest in neo-Velikowskianist

theories was well known, was dead on. There was no love lost

there.

‗Once we‘ve met our hosts and got a linguistics programme

up and running, I don‘t suppose it‘ll be long before Lochlin

has concluded that the absence of world myths about worlds

in collision means that the historical trauma of the cataclysm

has been blanked out.‘

‗Maybe,‘ Bernice said. ‗I hope the trade language Fellows

had documented on his teaching tapes gives us at least some

intro. I‘d much rather not be drawing squares in the sand for

a month while we try to work from first principles.‘

‗I doubt that will be necessary,‘ a voice said. It was harshly

accented, but it was perfectly understandable.

Morry was striding round the room declaiming his idea, while

Seb and the scientists who would have to put it into effect

scuttled after him taking notes.

‗Beam me into the Ninjucoid on a hypercable link and give

me two-way interaction with my body here. At this end I‘ll get

the real telemetry from the unit and be able to override any

local problems at the other until what I see there and what I

see here matches.‘

‗Risky,‘ Seb mused. ‗Bilocalization is a difficult technique

even for experienced teleops. How about you go all in and I

give you a voiceover?‘

‗What if the telemetry distort alters your input? I might be

building towers out of mashed potato while thinking it‘s

heads and at the same time be thinking you‘re telling me it‘s

heads when in fact you‘re telling me it‘s mashed potato.‘

Seb paused. ‗Run that by me again, boss?‘

‗Just arrange it. This is more than a simple contract

vengeance kick. Imagine if we could gain access to the

methodology of this sabotage. We could have the only

functioning modern army in local space. Isn‘t that worth a

little risk?‘

‗My name is Tenomi. I am the third Priest-King of that name.

I am in charge here. You do speak this language? I‘m afraid

it‘s simply the one most associated with the dreams of this

meeting, but I do speak forty-nine other Ghost Languages.‘

The voice came from a dais in the middle distance,

amplified by the acoustics of the room. Bernice guessed that

the chair the voice‘s owner was sitting in had been positioned

very carefully to take advantage of that effect. Even with the

amplification it was a whisper. Just a very, very loud one.

Despite the volume it still had the quaver of an old or sick

man.

Jane Steadman, the expedition‘s acting medical expert, and

the ship‘s doctor on the Second-Best Buy, led the rush to

investigate.

5

IN SEARCH OF ANCIENT

ASTRONAUTS

‗Are you sure this is wise?‘ Elspet‘s normally cheerful voice

sounded glum as he craned over the lip of the mini-volcano

in which Bernice was interred.

Bernice was a good hand‘s breadth shorter than a

Canopusi, and she was acutely aware that Elspet had a

perfect view of the top of her head from his walkway.

‗No, but it‘s the best way to find out if the Canopusi‘s

visions have any basis that can be communicated to a

human brain, and you have to admit that Tenomi was

pleased that we wanted to try to hear the voices of the Gods

direct. Call it PR if you want.‘

‗Hmm.‘

‗What‘s that supposed to mean?‘

‗Only that priests usually want to keep God and the

common people at one remove; Latin masses and scriptures

in metaphor and all the ritual gap between clergy and laity.

You don‘t think it‘s suspicious that they‘re trying to get us in

here so quickly after First Contact? What if the Spire‘s a

ginormous religious-fanatic-maker just waiting to pump one

hundred per cent conviction into alien minds?‘

‗Did Tenomi strike you as a fanatic?‘

‗No, he‘s a kindly old buffer, and I‘m as pleased as the rest

of us that Steadman‘s treatment seems to be shaking his

fever, but I‘m still rationally cautious. Remember, we don‘t

know where Fellows and the captain are. Besides, I‘m not

convinced by the ―we had to bring you here as fast as

possible because it was prophesied that we would‖

explanation. I don‘t see why they couldn‘t have prophesied

asking nicely first.‘

‗I agree, that is a bit pat. Almost as if Tenomi thought that

someone else might get to us if he didn‘t.‘

‗But you‘re still going to do this anyway.‘

‗Of course. OK, most of the Vision Cones have priests in,

or, to be strictly accurate, novices because they‘ve found that

youngsters resonate better. But anyone can come on a

pilgrimage to the Spire and have a go. Jane‘s had her medical

sensors set up in here for three days and I‘m wired up now to

more hyperencephalographs and micro-mind-probes than a

suspected criminal. There isn‘t anything here that could

harm me.‘

‗Then I don‘t see what you expect to happen. If there isn‘t

anything that could harm you, I don‘t see that there‘s going

to be anything that can act on you either.‘

‗That‘s what I want to find out. Wish me luck.‘

‗You do realize that in the absence of Fellows, Lochlin only

agreed to this experiment because he thinks you‘re

expendable.‘

‗Now that is news.‘

‗If you‘re going to be sarcastic, I hope you get visions of

sagging breasts and wrinkles.‘

Bernice gritted her teeth. ‗Just get ready to take notes.‘

The interior of the cone was hot, but surprisingly

comfortable. Its walls were lined with the fleeces of a

Canopusi animal farmed in the southlands and carried by

sandstrider caravans to the Spire. It was hard to just avoid

relaxing too much, switching off into sensory-deprivational

doodlings.

Then it was as if a hundred thousand volts had fired half

the axons in her brain.

Deprivation one minute, overload the next. Bernice‘s last

thought was that she guessed the Spire didn‘t deal in happy

mediums.

Sit up suddenly and if you‘re unfit you may for a second

experience your vision fading out as the blood rushes away

from the optic nerve receptor sites in your brain. Bernice

watched with detached interest as the sky faded into a grey

void - the mist on the windscreen of the oncoming car just

before the fatal crash. Why are elephants grey? Bernice

thought woozily. So they can hide in a bureaucracy.

The future dripped into her mind like a water torture.

The grey featureless sky ruptured with new Heavens and new

Earths. Worlds, as Professor Lochlin would say, in Collision.

Overhead a chain of Earths linked its way from horizon to

horizon.

Then hands in black gloves, hands the size of solar systems,

hands light days across, snapped the chain.

Oh, oh, Bernice thought. The last cosmos to break the chain

suffered a run of bad luck. Its wife was mistaken for a hat at a

shoe salesmen’s convention in Nashville and was badly

mauled, and its dog was run over by a driverless juggernaut

between Slough and Epsom. This must he what it felt like to go

mad.

Then the Earths went away. It happened with the

suddenness of a storm brewing but it was accompanied by a

shrinking and a dwindling as the shattered chain of worlds

twisted and became a gunmetal bulkhead. In that grey dream,

Bernice gasped at the grey air.

They say that on a long-inhabited world the odds that a

mouthful of air containing molecules that were once part of a

famous historical person are nearly a certainty. The air in the

dream had never been part of anyone. It was without lung or

temperature and somehow lifeless, as if moisture and bacteria

alike had been boiled out of it over a hundred thousand years.

It was breathable, at a stretch, but it was impossible to

imagine that it had been breathed before. At least, not by

anything organic.

Each breath of that air was a steel dagger in the lungs. It

was not the worst thing about the dream, however. The worst

thing was the face behind the glass. The face with its closed

eyes.

Then, I decided that if I could prove Singh‘s Collapsar

Conjecture valid, that would be one in the eye for Farouk, the

hawk-nosed old fossil, so I started to look for corroboratory

evidence. Professor Owl in Cosmology was kind enough to

loan me one of the hyperwave telescope arrays. The mock-

attractor survey was stalled pending analysis of the Zul-

Copperberg Equations, and I was - as I thought – close to

verifying the axionic dark-matter hypothesis that would

bolster Singh‘s Conjecture, but - and this was the killer – the

dark-matter source I detected was tied to a planetary mass in

our galaxy. Utterly unprecedented and unlooked for. So you

can imagine how astonishing it was to be offered backing so

easily for a visit to the site,‘ Fellows burbled. ‗Just, fantastic.

I…‘

He noticed that Captain Johansen had dozed off, under the

double layer of her and his survival suits. He shivered in his

underwear and blessed his cotton socks that he had not

decided to go naked under the suit. He was willing to bet that

Sandra had. He looked at her sleeping face. Charming,

absolutely charming. He could not help being sad that she

had gone to sleep. He had not even got to the really exciting

part yet.

‗I never told you about the tachyons,‘ he mused softly.

‗What,‘ said Mandir, ‘is a ―tachyon‖? Surely some of what this

creature said must be comprehensible.‘

‗Perhaps he realized your scribes were recording his

speech,‘ Geth ventured.

‗Possibly. Arrg, how annoying it is to have netted this runt

of the eggbatch and this sleep-ridden she, when Tenomi‘s

men took the God‘s share of the prize. Does your scholarship

in the languages avail us nothing? Come, I must learn what

his kind may be telling Tenomi.‘

Geth flicked through the laboriously compiled dictionaries

of Ghost Languages. ‗It is of the language called Greek; from

the word for fast, a ―fast‖ thing.‘

‗Interesting. I wonder what our fascinating guest is so

concerned with here, that is so fast. I would have said we

were a slow people, a plodding people.‘ His voice hardened,

and a thrill ran down the scales of Geth‘s back. ‗How can we

do more than plod when we carry our Gods on our backs like

weights of iron?‘ He shook his large, heavy head sorrowfully.

‗I must return to the Spire to discover whether our good High

Priest has been helped by these strangers. If so, if there is no

threat, then of course we must see that they rejoin their

friends.‘ He stopped, considering. ‗In fact, I see no threat here

at all. Release them and return them to the Spire. We will

watch them carefully there. Let them believe that you have

freed them from bandits, and henceforth they will tell you all

we wish to know. Give me time to ride to the Spire first

though. It would not do if I were to be connected with their

tardiness.‘

In the dream, there was a human face the other side of a

transparent window inset into the grey metal, an injured face

with its eyes tight shut. Its cheekbones were ragged and

bruising mottled its left side.

In the dream there was a grey button.

It was pressed and the face was flung away, receding, flung

out into something destructive and black as pitch, flung out to

die.

It was the face of Jane Steadman.

The finger on the button had been Bernice’s own.

She had killed the doctor.

Then she was being pulled out of the Vision Cone, and she

was crying like a baby.

The High Priest was sitting up in bed drinking a weak

infusion of herbs. The fever was going. It had been, he

gathered, a matter of luck that he had responded to the

drugs in the human‘s medicine bag. They were what she

called ‗generic medicines‘ - smart drugs capable of

determining what needed to be done and re-engineering their

own molecular structure to accomplish it. The luck consisted

in his biology being close enough to something the memory

cues in the drug could recognize. He had, however, a

headache, and the plump human called Jarvis Lochlin was

doing nothing to dispel it. It was half a night since the alien

woman had been pulled out of the meditation pit, but she

was still in shock.

‗I am worried about the effects on Professor Summerfield,‘

Lochlin said, unconvincingly. ‗She‘s been unconscious for

four hours, but I am more worried about the general effect on

morale if this vision of hers were to spread further. I‘ve issued

strict instructions to Elspet to destroy his notes and I hope

that you‘ll give me your word that the scribe who made this -‘

Lochlin passed a clay tablet to Tenomi ‗- will also, ah, keep

mum, as we say. I‘m particularly concerned that Jane

Steadman doesn‘t hear about it. Nothing worse than a doctor

spending her time worrying about mortality, eh?‘

Tenomi looked at the clay tablet. The words on it -

‗betrayal‘, ‗death‘, ‗sacrifice‘, ‗Jane‘ - told him the kind of

thing the alien had experienced but not the details. Perhaps

they were not his business. It was no wonder that some of

the Priesthood flocked to Mandir and his cynical denial of the

Gods when their wavering High Priest could not muster

greater faith.

‗I wish I had not permitted this experiment, Professor

Lochlin. I certainly did not intend that your colleague should

come to harm. We will do as you ask.‘ Tenomi tried to think

of some comfort it might offer. ‗When she awakes, tell her

that barely one in twenty of the things we see come to pass in

the way we first imagine; and three in every twenty do not

happen at all. Only the Gods who built the Spire ever saw

with that clarity that makes all things seen into necessary

truths, cast into the universe as shapes are cast in metal.

Inviolable facts nailed with pins of diamond to the walls of

adamantine necessity.‘

* * *

The sound of the wooden bars being lifted woke Sandra from

her knife-edge sleep. A native was snaking its head and neck

around the door. She took in the dozing form of Professor

Fellows slumped in his underwear against the wall; he wasn‘t

going to be any help. Sweet, but no help.

So she got the neck between her hands and squeezed.

‗Stop,‘ the reptile choked out, ‗I‘m here to help you.‘

The High Priest‘s eyes were slowly blinking pools of ebony.

Lochlin felt a bead of sweat force itself between his neck and

his collar. This sweltering heat, even at night - how could the

natives stand it? Perhaps seeing the future taught them

stoicism, the doctrine of enduring the incurable. ‗I‘ll tell her

that,‘ he said. The unspoken thought, ‗if she recovers‘, hung

between them. ‗Only the Gods get it right all the time. She‘ll

appreciate that.‘

‗Of course the infallibility of the Gods is only one legend.‘ A

crippled Canopusi stood in the doorway of the High Priest‘s

chambers. Even hunched, it was taller than Lochlin. ―There

are other legends. According to one, the Gods made one

prediction so dreadful, so horrible in its implications, that

they raced back to Heaven and bolted its doors and windows

tight behind themselves so that the future could not enter,

but one of the Gods‘ children had been born a thousand

years of the Gods less one day before, and, not wishing to

lose the celebration of that natal day, crept down in the night

and opened the window of Heaven to let the next day in.

Then with that day the future came with all its implications,

and the Gods went mad and rent their fineries crying, ―Woe

and lamentation upon the heads of the Gods who have seen

what will befall their children‘s children, and cannot change

it‖.‘

‗Mandir represents a necessary antidote to my own

temperament in our deliberations,‘ Tenomi said sharply, ‗but

I assure you that his story is merely a children‘s tale. It is

not, as you would say, canonical.‘

‗Only a quaint story,‘ Mandir said regretfully. ‗I find it the

one consoling tale in the whole of our literature for it tells us

that the Gods are dead and cannot come out of their graves.

If they did, then I doubt we would long survive their coming.‘

From the diary of Bernice Summerfield

That was a baaaad trip! Don‘t try this at home kids. If you

can‘t stand the heat stay out of the future. Oh, too late!

If I had a set of neural inputs that weird a century ago, I‘d

probably be a nonviral schizophrenic by now, but smiling

Jane with her little black bag and her mother‘s little helpers

pulled me out of it. I haven‘t been able to tell her what I saw

and my babbling was instantly classified by Lochlin, Elspet

tells me, so no harm done. Unless of course it comes true.

What else? Well, while I was out of it, Fellows and Sandra

turned up. Rescued by a passing priest called Geth from

some sandbandits. Convinced? I nearly converted. I mean,

Good Samaritan or what? According to Elspet, who got it

from his sources in the Priesthood - drop Elspet on a desert

island and pretty soon he‘d be sidling up to the coconut trees

and whispering, ‗I shouldn‘t tell you this but the beach told

me in confidence that Mrs Crab has been seeing an Oyster‘ -

Geth was already based at the Spire so what was he doing

out in the wastes in the first place? The Canopusi don‘t have

a tradition of going out to seek visions in the desert. They

mainline their visions in the comfort of their own cones.

Something‘s rotten in the state of Canopus.

Other news. Fellows and the Priest-King have struck some

kind of deal, based on Fellows‘ inspection of the hieroglyphs.

I gather it was all he needed to prove a theory that he‘d

formulated during his initial surveys. The nameless Gods of

the Spire have a name now, and it‘s got a ‗ in it.

I should have seen it coming.

The Vo‘lach have been here. A geological age or so ago, the

current bad boys of the interstellar arms trade came and

built a vast Future-Viewer on a world of protosentient

reptiloids. Why? Who the hell knows?

Wait. It gets worse.

That deal.

It goes like this. We get full archaeological and physics

access to the Spire, we get to be told the mysteries, see the

holy relies, run all the heathen tests we want to with our

Godless equipment - OK, Tenomi is too liberal to talk like

that but Elspet tells me he has a glum second in command

who sounds like he doesn‘t approve of aliens - and in return

all we have to do is take Tenomi to meet his Gods.

His Gods, the gunrunners.

The inhabitants of an unknown world generally believed to

be the most heavily armed planet in conjectured space. The

ones that every military and, presumably, every criminal

warlord with two ships and a hold full of custard-pie-

throwing multi-cannon want to interview with their

competitors‘ nuclear weapons.

I‘ve stopped worrying about my book.

I‘ve started worrying about my skin.

Extract ends

Bernice was sulking, Antok decided. He had been trying to

interest her in some of the physics problems of the Spire:

how it could stand up under its own weight; why Coriolis

force winds didn‘t blow it over; even why it gave all those odd

internal readings that Fellows had been so enthusiastic

about in orbit. Antok knew that he wasn‘t supposed to be

talking about those, but he couldn‘t see that it mattered. It

wasn‘t as if he was telling a male who couldn‘t hold his

tongue.

Bernice was an alpha-female, albeit an alien one, and

Antok‘s whole Goll upbringing made it impossible for him not

to trust her. Unfortunately for Bernice, she wasn‘t really

listening, and Goll culture also insisted that gamma-males

should be seen and not heard.

So when the reptile Geth came and offered Bernice a tour

of the Spire, and her face lit up, Antok was far too diffident to

interrupt, or to offer to accompany her.

* * *

Geth stood two hands higher than Bernice - a typically

stretched-out Canopusi. Now that she was meeting them on

non-spear-waving terms, she had begun to notice differences

colouring and crest braiding that she assumed were the

products of separated tribal cultures. Geth‘s skin shaded

from a fresh orange at the nape of the neck to a darker blood-

orange colour around the throat sac. His crest was pierced

with three metal studs that looked like bronze. Their surfaces

were carved too finely for Bernice to make out the details -

she hadn‘t quite nerved herself to ask him to bend down. He

wore gold armour that was actually a very thin layer of

metallic dye over cloth stretched and moulded with organic

glues so that it formed a stiff light shell- There hadn‘t been a

war for centuries; no one used real armour any more.

He was very friendly, and he spoke her language. Wasn‘t

that a killer? Bernice thought. Half the equipment of any

xeno-archaeological expedition, particularly in an official

First Contact situation, was linguistic-analysis computers,

logical-teaching packages, and sticks for drawing pictures in

the sand, and this time they were not going to need any of it.

When she asked about it he had been happy to explain. ‗I

speak seventeen of the languages of the Future, Ssduss,dfuss

in our tongue, ―Ghost Languages‖ I suppose you would say.

Until recently we believed that all the images we dreamt of

near the Spire were of the far far future when this world is

much changed and many different peoples five here, but

Heirosarch Mandir has suggested that some of what we know

may have been only from the near future, the past now – for

we have collected data since our race discovered the Spire -

and hence we might expect that some of the visitors

predicted in our dreams would use the languages from our

dreams. It was a brilliant deduction, typical of Mandir.‘

‗Wunderkind is he?‘

Geth looked startled. Bernice guessed that German

derivations weren‘t part of his vocabulary.

‗He is our greatest thinker.‘

‗Not Tenomi?‘ Bernice asked sensing a jockeying for

position. Geth sounded like a recent convert to Mandir‘s

cheerleaders.

‗Tenomi is a great leader, but he is old,‘ Geth said seriously.

‗Some people think that he lacks the will to alter how things

are.‘

‗And Mandir has that will?‘

‗I think there is nothing that Mandir would not risk to

ensure the happy future of our people,‘ Geth said simply.

‗I‘ll bet,‘ Bernice muttered.

In a hollow in the desert, excavated by the jets of the black

ship, Mandir met the Negotiator from the arms merchants

alone. Some things were too important to be left to any

subordinates. It had taken twelve years even to learn of these

weapons sellers, and another five to learn how to contact

them. The information had been gleaned gradually from the

alien prospectors who had come to Mandir‘s world during his

rise in the Priesthood. Slowly, carefully so that no word of

their existence reached Tenomi; slowly, carefully so that

Canopus never became so dangerous as to deter further

prospectors or as to make an invasion the economically

favoured method of futurite-hunting, he had arranged for the

picking off of a prospector here, a surveyor there. Under

painful persuasion they had told him much, and now finally

he could deal for the weapons that he had seen in the

forbidden texts. He would buy the black heart of the future.

The creature that met him looked far more like a Canopusi

than any of the humans, but Mandir felt that it might be less

like them underneath. Even while they negotiated it was

getting more and more lifelike with each moment as if it was

completing a puzzle box under its skin; a puzzle box made of

Canopusi‘s bones and muscles.

When the deal was concluded, and Mandir felt free to

indulge his curiosity, he asked, ‗What kind of being are you?‘

‗I am not a being. I am a mechanism of contractual

negotiation. I have taken this form as a reassurance. I can

take others. I sell fine weapons. I arrange payment. Those are

my functions.‘

‗And your masters, who are they?‘

‗I serve the Vo‘lach purpose.‘

Mandir‘s eyes widened. He had been told the phonetic

translation of the name of the Gods that the human, Fellows,

had construed from the carvings on the Spire. For a second a

feeling of awe touched him. Were the Gods really still

watching over their people, fulfilling his needs for their

greater good? No, he denied the thought. There were no

Gods. Not in the sense that Tenomi meant. There were aliens

that had left the abomination to corrupt the Canopusi, and

there was this thing. This mechanism. He had to know how

the two were connected!

‗What is that purpose?‘

He expected to be met with silence or denial. The last thing

he expected was that the mechanism would tell him.

Nor when it did, could he at first believe his senses.

Then he did something he had not done for many years. He

began to laugh.

The starship scooted through the Canopus system under full

drive as a wavefront of virtual particles existing in a folded

Minkowski tessaractic compaction - what the scientifically

illiterate would call hyperdrive. Morry always spelt out the

full physics of it to himself. Even though he knew that he

barely understood it, it still made him feel safe.

When it was in that part of fold-space that bore a one-to-

one mapping boundary with the orbital approach range of

Canopus IV, it ejected the pod. A second later and ten

thousand kilometres farther on, the pod completed its

deceleration into non-folded space and Morry the Ninjucoid

began his shielded dive into the planet‘s gravity well.

Somewhere on the planet was a Vo‘lach merchant; he was

going to find it and force it to tell him where its home planet

was. He was looking forward to it no end.

‗Tell me,‘ Mandir said. ‗If you were to discover that - speaking

hypothetically - a group of travellers were endeavouring to

locate the homeworld of your masters, what would you do? In

pursuit of your noble aim?‘

The Canopusi-mechanism tilted its head on one side. It

was starting to be quite unnerving how it was picking up

Mandir‘s own body language. Why, soon he would be staring

into his own image in the glass of its face.

‗I would seek to prevent them. Without overstepping other

programming parameters implicit in the purpose.‘

‗Then prepare yourself, for this is indeed the case.‘

‗Very well. My ship, which is an autonomous entity, will

convey your order to the Factories. I will stay to prevent this

expedition.‘

‗Good. I will be very interested to see how you do so, given

your other programming parameters, as you call them.‘

‗I am uninterested in requiting your curiosity - that is

external to the purpose. Take me to the site of the

expedition‘s preparations. I will do the rest.‘

There are no words for some things. A six-foot man is tall, a

three-hundred-storey stratoscraper is a wonder of the world.

The Spire made immense look small. The central arch made

the buttress they had been in before look like a ramshackle

outhouse.

‗Thank you,‘ Bernice said. ‗I don‘t think I could have

suffered just getting back into our ship and scooting off to

look for the Gods without getting a chance to see this.‘

She squinted up into the inner sky. ‗I can just about see

the internal structure, an inner cylinder of dark metal that

ends in a flat surface about three kilometres up supported by

white girders spiralling outward into the walls. But there‘s a

kind of tracery I can‘t make out. What is it?‘

Geth smiled. ‗That is where the stairs we have built over

the centuries reach the girders and continue upward.‘

Bernice looked into his alien face for any hint of irony. ‗They

begin over there,‘ he added helpfully.

Bernice looked where he was pointing. Between four

brightly painted statues, apparently of children‘s toys -

curious decor choice - wooden steps on an increasingly

complex gantry of cantilevered supports ran upward into

infinity.

Morry slit the reptile‘s throat, and waited while the devices

in his hands sampled the creature‘s skin at a genetic level

and punched the codes into the autosplicers. Minutes later,

scales were sprouting over the armature of the Ninjucoid‘s

biomatrix. In an hour or so he would be utterly

indistinguishable from the Canopusi herdsman who had

been unlucky enough to come to see what the light in the sky

had been.

This was like a fox strolling into the hen coop with a really

convincing chicken suit. Morry couldn‘t help grinning. The

poor saps weren‘t going to know what hit them. Unless he left

a note of course.

The Negotiator considered. In its inorganic mind a sequence

of opposing logical imperatives promoted first one

methodology and then another. It did not care. It did not

think. It had no consciousness. The Vo‘lach had never

knowingly constructed sentient machines. Inside its head it

had the sub-molecular equivalent of punched-card programs

and that was all; but it had a lot of them and it could sort

them quickly according to complex rules.

It picked one. Identify a target who would be beyond

suspicion. Replace them and sabotage the expedition from

within. Without a second thought, without even a first one, it

started to put its instructions into practice.

‗Morry 1 to Morry 2. This is your external update. Watch out

for native opposition. I‘m afraid you didn‘t kill that

herdsman: you merely gave him a close shave - enough to get

a DNA equivalent sample, that‘s all. He ran off howling in a

bit of a lather.

‗Well don‘t get stroppy with me. I am you, after all. I

couldn‘t tell you earlier because we hadn‘t got the hypercable

relay deployed around Canopus IV until a minute ago. Listen,

there‘s worse. We‘re one step behind. The Vo‘lach have been

and gone. Their ship did a fast take-off while you were on the

way down. I‘ll just forget you said that, shall I? Although we

could do that if we could get the two of us in one place, and

we‘d been through puberty. What do I suggest you do now? I

don‘t know - use my initiative, can‘t you? I‘m watching. Kill

people until you find out something useful; it‘s always

worked before.‘

6

SAILING TO BIZARRUM

From the diary of Bernice Summerfield

It‟s so much the wrong way round that I ought to be dressing

backwards. I‟m here heading for what looks likely to be a

physically and theologically unpleasant diplomatic mission

while Professor Fellows, a non-archaeologist, mind you, gets

to stay behind and study the single largest alien artefact I‟ve

ever encountered that was not burnt to a frazzle by an

inconvenient nova the moment I got near it.

I wouldn‟t have minded if his arguments hadn‟t been so

spurious. „So it‟s still working. So what? So the race that

built it is still active. So what? If it‟s old it‟s archaeology,‟ I

said, and all he did was look at me with utter pity and say,

“Professor Summerfield, a broken pot-shard is archaeology, a

fragment of unexplained alloy on a Stone Age world is

archaeology. This is physics.‟ I‟m definitely going to have to

rewrite that conversation, as soon as I can think of

something devastating enough for me to have said.

Extract ends

The Second-Best Buy meandered through space, its

computers checking and rechecking the ancient star charts

that Fellows had taken from the walls of the Spire against

thousands of years of stellar deviation, and the rotation of

the galaxy‟s spiral arms. Sergei Guildhall, the ship‟s

navigator, estimated that the trip would take about two

weeks, and the great majority of the time would be spent in

map-making. A disgruntled New Bosnian émigré, he spent

most of the time grumbling to anyone who would listen about

the map-matching algorithms, or the time lag in hypercable

messages from his lover back on the refugee station that

most people called Big Bulgaria. Eventually, the rest of the

crew started playing high-card draw to decide who should sit

with him in the navigation suite and make sure he didn‟t

break anything. In the absence of anything more interesting

on board, Bernice took the duty slightly more often, even

though her skill at cards would have enabled her to avoid it.

Guildhall was a muscular, saturnine man, a tad below the

ergometric human male average in height, who maintained a

careful traditional spacer‟s tan: a bronzed face with sharp

primitive helmet edges, and a dead white body. Bernice knew

full well that the glow was imparted not by the scaring light

of strange suns, but by a bank of medically modulated UV

lights in his stateroom. He reminded Bernice of a friendly

puppy, but one that might grow up into something banned

under the Dangerous Alien Pets Act.

„I just don‟t get what they were thinking of,‟ he moaned.

„They were space travellers. They must have looked at the

stars.‟

Bernice looked at the overhead displays where the words

UNCERTAIN MATCH, ABSOLUTE MAGNITUDE VARIATIONS

OUTSIDE SAFE IDENTIFICATION PARAMETERS, and WHAT

THE HELL KIND OF STAR IS THAT? were flashing by in

pinpricks of computer-modelled light, and nursed her beer.

Guildhall was quite a restful companion: he was willing

enough to carry on both sides of a conversation.

„I mean, take pulsars, over seven hundred mapped in our

galaxy alone, perfect natural beacons. Radio waves, gamma

rays, X-rays, you would think sources of at least one of those

would be interesting enough to the Vo‟lach to merit being on

their maps.‟

Bernice hesitated, but you didn‟t get to be a top-rated

archaeologist by failing to ask questions just because they

might turn out to be blindingly obvious. „Are there any

pulsars marked at all, or is it that they just don‟t match up

with the present galaxy?‟

„There are some undeciphered symbols that might

represent spinning neutron stars but they‟re nowhere near

present pulsars, even allowing for any conceivable rate of

proper stellar motion and galactic rotation.‟

„So, pulsars slow down, don‟t they?‟

Sergei‟s pale-blue eyes met hers. „Yes, at about a millionth

of a millisecond of rotation a day when their gas toruses are

as thick as the one in the Crab Nebula, with the rate of

retardation itself slowing down as the gas clouds thin out.‟

„How long would it have taken for all the rotating neutron

stars the Vo‟lach mapped to slow down to the point where

they don‟t send out detectable radio pulses?‟

„Give me a moment.‟

„Sure, you‟ve got the computer link.‟

Sergei‟s eyes glazed over into idiot-savant introspection.

Bernice winced as she imagined the bright fire of figures

materializing in his brain. Then, snap, he was back in his

right mind, grinning like a bandicoot.

„Ten million years, maybe fifteen top whack. No wonder I‟ve

not been getting a valid match. I‟ve been trying to match the

current generation of pulsars against last year‟s crop.‟ His

teeth flashed their dazzling smile. „Astronomically speaking.

The ones we use as beacons would still have been late-

sequence stars when the Vo‟lach were mapping the galaxy.

I‟d kiss you if I wasn‟t worried Mark‟d get to hear about it.‟

His face collapsed back into gloom. „Not that it helps – if I

can‟t take a short cut matching pulsars, I‟m still stuck with

tagging every stable red giant and running probability

matches on main sequence changes until I get prospective

IDs on enough to let the maps merge.‟

„What about quasars?‟ Bernice said curiously. „Couldn‟t you

map backwards from them? They haven‟t changed in ten

million years.‟

„No quasars,‟ Sergei said flatly. „First thing I look for. None

at all.‟

Bernice turned the problem over in her mind that night. She

was on day shift, mainly makework so her sleep pattern

tallied with the slow rhythms of the shiplights.

The light from the quasars had been travelling for between

ten to the power eighteen and ten to the power nineteen

years to reach the Milky Way. Next to that even ten million

years was a single footstep. It still wasn‟t clear what quasars

were. Opinion in the astrophysics department was presently

about equally quadrisected between four radically different

theories. It was, however, clear that they had been visible in

the same relative positions for at least a billion years.

Consequently, they had to have been visible to the Vo‟lach.

They had travelled in space; they had built a single planet-

bound structure beyond any current engineering principle;

they were still, apparently, according to myth, encouraging

people to shoot each other in half the war zones of the galaxy.

Bernice was willing, just, to believe that there might be an

explanation that encompassed all those points, but she

couldn‟t see a reason for the quasars not to have been

mapped. It was a silly, niggling point, but it stopped her

getting any unbroken sleep that night.

Two days passed with only hypercanastra and splitting

headaches for company. Three times Bernice got the text of

her book out of computer storage and then filed it away

again. Why bother when God knew it already? She still

hadn‟t answered that one to her own satisfaction.

On the third day, Sergei got a valid match.

Captain Johansen, with the heavy jocularity that marks

out people with no natural sense of humour, decided that

they ought to have a party to celebrate. Bernice volunteered

to sit in a corner and cut out paper chains from a dumped

hard copy of her magnum opus. There was no arguing with

some people.

Later, when the party poppers were scuttling over the

ship‟s furniture, their little bioengineered farting noises

guaranteeing amusement, at least according to the packet,

Bernice picked at her salad and people-watched.

The canteen was the one place on board where you could

guarantee that most of the crew was really present For a

start, it was the only room large enough. Even with the

furniture fully retracted most of the ship‟s staterooms were

strictly one-person or two-very-intimate-person rooms. For a

second, virtualities might stand watch or, with pressor

technology, carry out engineering work; sometimes Bernice

suspected that most of them were not even hooked up to real

crew members at the other end of the interstitial links, but

not even the most hardened hypernet junkie could eat

without being really in the same place as the food.

It reminded her of the university refectories back on Dellah,

which was depressing. It would be Michael‟s Mass term

there, just after the feast of St Barnabas and all Toads in the

Third Revised Protestant Calendar so there would be Peking

duck and little sausages with herb fillings, and several

varieties of figgy pudding, and the Dean‟s home brew, and

the students would be if anything thinner on the ground

than usual. She knew that if she had been there she would

have been hating the recently acquired (for „acquired‟ read

„invented‟) ancient traditions that faculty had decided to go in

for in order to drum up grants from local worlds that had

invested heavily in back-to-basics sociologies. But as it was

she would have French-kissed the Dean for a plate of figgy

pudding and an expandable silly hat.

She was seriously considering trying to start up a round of

drinking games or amusingly vulgar songs when something

caught her eye.

Sometimes a person stands out in a crowd. Sometimes

there is a sexual attraction, sometimes recognition. Just

occasionally the person is a nine-foot-tall alien swathed in

red velvet. Tenomi made a honking noise of recognition, and

several gleaming lenses peered from his red hood.

When they got closer, Bernice saw that the lenses were

biomechanical ocular enhancers, mostly normal to infrared

converters. Poking out of the robe‟s hood like the eyes of an

ancient gas mask, they made the alien‟s features mere

surroundings to their cold, single-matt, white circles, but

Bernice got the impression of tight, scaled, orange skin and a

faint sheen of oils. A nice healthy tangerine flush, she

decided. Not sickly. Good, she was glad to see the old dear

looking better.

„I‟ve been having trouble with the ship‟s atmosphere and

lighting. Professor,‟ Tenomi said. „These filters help, but I‟m

sorry I haven‟t been able to talk to you before. I‟ve bitterly

regretted what happened to you in the Vision Cone. Tell an

old priest that he is forgiven, please.‟

„Think nothing of it.‟

„Thank you. I will not.‟

He still seemed uneasy, and, although Bernice was only

beginning to study Canopusi body language with the help of

Geth, who had been included in the expedition supposedly as

Tenomi‟s amanuensis - but, Bernice thought, really as an

observer for Mandir - she felt that he was ill at ease.

„What do -?‟ they said together.

„Ah, after you,‟ Bernice said.

„No, my dear Professor, you ask first by all means.‟

„Well, it‟s just that you seem a liberal, educated, benevolent

sort of Priest-King, not at all a raging fanatic.‟

„I will, as I understand you say, take that as a compliment.‟

„Right, but what I‟m getting at is, if you take that view, why

this pilgrimage? What do you actually want to see your Gods

for? Let sleeping Gods he, I say.‟

Tenomi selected a mixed salad from the table menu, and

Bernice noted with amusement that he punched in a calorie

limit on the dressing. Honestly, she hadn‟t expected a

Canopusi to have picked up dieting yet. With a hiccup the

table produced a selection of raw extraterrestrial vegetables,

some of which wouldn‟t have looked out of place on That’s

Life. Bernice found it hard to avoid a smirk. She managed it,

however: being too at home in the past was advantageous to

a historian but it could get you some odd looks. Once the

university‟s antique backup plasma generator (a genuine

MHD series-eleven with auxiliary ducting) had been on the

blink and James McPherson, a technical student in his

fourth year, had been volunteered to take a look at it. It had

taken Bernice twenty minutes to explain why she had fallen

about laughing when his girlfriend had said, „Oh, Jim‟ll fix it.‟

It was a kind of reverse future shock.

The alien crunched through the vegetables methodically.

Eating at a steady rate, with a rasp rasp that didn‟t sound

like teeth. More like vastly enlarged caterpillar sounds. When

he had finished, he said, „I‟m sorry if that seemed rude, but I

needed to put my thoughts in order. I‟m afraid I don‟t think I

can explain until I‟ve asked you my question. As an honest

woman and a scholar, tell me: what are the Vo‟lach. Are they

gods?‟

Bernice considered. She didn‟t want to torpedo anyone‟s

hard-won religious faith, but if she was going to be put on

her honour... „I don‟t think so,‟ she said, fiddling with another

pancake of crispy duck. „No one knows much about them.

The prevailing theory is that they‟re a silicon-cyborg race with

a pathological fear of life based on organic chemistry. They

sell other races weapons, according to myth, to, ah, toughen

them up for the table as it were.‟ Tenomi had tilted his head

to one side, a sign of puzzlement, Bernice had gathered. „That

is, to make them stronger opponents for some future war.‟

„A war the Vo‟lach will fight?‟

„That seems the implication.‟

The alien emitted a strangulated squeak, and Bernice

wondered if a root vegetable had gone down the wrong way,

or if she had deeply offended the High Priest. She was, after

all, dishing the dirt on his Gods.

„Tell me,‟ she asked, „is Fellows only interested in the Spire

as a physical artefact?”

„You mean what else am I paying for this trip?‟

„I suppose so.‟

„I am empowered to make considerable mining concessions

in repayment for the university‟s cooperation in outfitting an

expedition to Vo‟lach.‟

„Well...‟ Bernice hesitated. „That‟s very interesting. We aren‟t

exactly geared up to exploit a world‟s mineral wealth, you

know.‟

„Fellows explained that Spin ward Corporations, or Dbuk

Industries, or one of the local three-star „empires‟ will be

happy to subcontract the actual work. He tells me that

Canopus IV is brimming with exotic stabilized elements,

starting at the Eka-series and working upwards. Detritus

from the construction of the Spire itself, he says.‟ Tenomi‟s

voice was soft and gentle. „However, the materials hold no

special significance for us, we make use of their cutting

properties, but they make the land hard to till with their

hardness and where they lie the dreams of the laity are

disturbed. Much as I would not have you tell Professor

Fellows this, we would have been inclined to pay him to take

the stones away if he had not told us their value. We will be

rid of a nuisance. Some world or corporation will have a

greater treasury or dividend, and with the proceeds we will be

able to fund your university‟s endeavours for a thousand

years. All we ask is to learn why the Vo‟lach touched our

world.‟

Bernice sighed. „I thought they had stuck their

metaphorical noses out into the galaxy, found it chock full of

things utterly unlike them and immediately went back home

in a huff, and killed anything that might one day look like the

horrors of everybody else.‟

Tenomi rocked with shock. He seemed really disturbed, as

if Bernice‟s words triggered some conflict deep within him.

The High Priest seemed a mass of contradictions. On the one

hand he had clearly assimilated a good deal of information

about the modern galaxy, a disturbing amount almost; on

the other, any discussion about possible hostility from the

Vo‟lach seemed to incapacitate him.

„Is that really what is said of them?‟

„I‟m afraid so. No one has actually seen their homeworld of

course, but according to rumour they exterminated all native

life on it with the exception of themselves.‟ She patted an

orange clawed hand, nervously. „I suppose the animals and

plants could all have suffered a fatal accident involving a

particularly poor summer.‟

Tenomi made an eructating noise deep in his throat.

Bernice saw that his flesh was turning a very strange shade

of orange indeed. Almost purple. Under the scarlet of his

gown, his limbs shook. Geth, who had come up, silently

Bernice noted, during the conversation, caught the High

Priest as he fell.

Bernice was already yelling for Doctor Steadman.

Doctor Steadman pressed her fingers carefully into Tenomi‟s

side, and whistled softly under her breath. „Well, you were

right. He was poisoned.‟ The ship‟s doctor was a short

brunette woman approximately fifty years of age, which with

modem medicine meant anything between thirty and seventy.

Since Bernice had last seen the doctor in the vision, in which

Bernice had ejected her from an airlock, she was finding her

company a bit fraught, but she seemed a fine doctor, if a

surprisingly unexcitable one.

„It‟ll be all right?‟

„Oh, it‟ll be fine. It‟s the wider implications I‟m worried

about. I just don‟t see why anyone would use poison.‟

Bernice hesitated. „If I said to kill him, would I be hot or

cold?‟

Jane smiled. „That‟s not what I mean. Listen - Geth will

confirm this - when I was treating Tenomi I had to learn

Canopusi biology from the bottom up and the inside out. OK,

I just pumped him full of generic medicine, but I had to know

that it wouldn‟t kill him first.‟

„So why will he be all right? You haven‟t done anything.‟

Bernice felt like the Panic Fairy in the World of Stolid People.

„Don‟t need to. The Canopusi have four stomachs of various

sizes, each carefully evolved to break down particular foods,

practically chemical laboratories in themselves. Canopus IV

must have been a hard world to evolve on. The stomachs are

valved and can be cut off from the rest of the body by

spasming their sphincter muscles if an irritant reaches them.

Any stomach can operate independently from the others. The

stomach that has been poisoned will cyst itself off, collapse

into a hard nodule and be ejected from the body by a

secondary route; in a week he‟ll have grown a new stomach.

We‟ll be able to dissect the one that gets ejected to see what‟s

caused this. I was feeling for the lump of the collapsed

stomach. I don‟t even need to run a scan. He‟ll be all right in

an hour or so. What I don‟t understand is that anyone

knowing enough about their biology to know how to poison

them would have to know that it simply wouldn‟t work.‟ Jane

looked seriously at Bernice. „That doesn‟t mean I don‟t think

we should worry. If it was a fission grenade in the cargo bay

we‟d all be a loosely associated cloud of carbon, hydrogen,

nitrogen and oxygen by now; but there‟s no immediate

danger to Tenomi from the poison.‟

Twenty minutes later (there was no nice way to describe

this) a secondary anus opened and deposited a hard mass -

not unlike a Brussels sprout, Bernice thought.

Jane ran it through an analyser.

„Colchicine.‟

„What?‟ Bernice asked, feeling the Dr Watson medal for

sidekicks getting nearer and nearer to her lapel.

„It‟s an alkaloid with antimitotic properties. It‟s been about

four hundred years since it‟s had any use in human

medicine: gout, neoplastic deformation, and familial

Mediterranean fever all have easier treatments these days,

but it‟s still used in preference to expensive synthetics as an

experimental tool in the study of cell division. I‟ll check the

ship‟s biological stores.‟

Bernice resisted the temptation to prod the Brussels sprout

with her finger. After all, she knew where it had been. „What

does it do exactly?‟

„In humans, it causes nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain,

damage to the GI tract, liver and kidneys, bone-marrow

suppression, and death, at fairly high dosages.‟

„That sounds like a poisoning to me.‟

„Yes, but just a peculiarly futile one. As I said, he‟s going to

be fine.‟

Tenomi stirred on the couch. „And he is most grateful,

Doctor.‟

Doctor Steadman blushed. „I‟m sorry, Tenomi. I didn‟t

mean to talk, as if you weren‟t here. I thought you were still

in cSinthus.‟ Jane turned slightly to direct her next words as

an aside to Bernice. „That‟s the Canopusi term for a semi-

unconscious, nerve-blocked state entered into while a

stomach is ejected. There is always some trace toxicity.‟ She

looked back at Tenomi. „If you don‟t mind I think you should

stay here for a while, and with your permission I‟ll run some

tests. Get a base-line set of readings for your physiognomy

since we entered hyperdrive; check that Canopusi don‟t

suffer from Real Space Deprivation Syndrome; generally give

you a ninety-light-year service.‟

„Certainly, I am at your disposal, but I wonder: could I

simply rest a while first? Then you may wheel up your

scanners, and click away to your heart‟s content. Until then I

will merely thank you again. You have saved my life.‟

„Not at all. Your secondary stomach isolated itself and kept

the poison away from the bloodstream. You should be

thanking evolution. I mean your Gods.‟

Tenomi smiled his disconcertingly sweet smile. „Just

because I believe in the Gods does not mean I disbelieve in

the evidence of my own eyes or the reasoning of my own and

other minds. I am not offended that you have your beliefs. I

ask only that you examine them logically and to destruction,

and I will do the same with mine. In that way we will find

truth.‟

Jane smiled back. „I will, I promise. Now you‟re quite right:

you‟re going to need some sleep. Biology, whoever is

responsible for it, has been made to need rest, and I‟m

trusting you to be sensible and get some. Everyone else can

come with me and leave you to it. There won‟t be any visiting

time until this evening. Chop chop, everyone.‟

Outside the medical rooms, outside of Tenomi‟s hearing,

Jane took Bernice aside, waving the others on. Bernice noted

that Geth went reluctantly. She was going to have to have

words with that young quasi-reptile.

She steeled herself to deal with someone who might soon

be dead by her hand.

„I think we have a killer on board,‟ Jane said. „Someone

lacking familiarity with Canopusi digestion, which I guess

leaves Geth out, although he might not be medically trained.

I‟m worried about what might happen next.‟

„What do you suggest?‟ Bernice asked.

„That we see Captain Johansen together, and get her to

turn the ship around. Once back on Canopus we can send

another party to Vo‟lach Prime now we know where it is, one

that doesn‟t contain anyone currently on this ship.‟ Jane‟s

eyes were worried, sympathetic. She can‟t bear to see anyone

suffer, Bernice thought, and then wondered why she should

feel that such a quality was somehow dangerous. Wasn‟t it

only to be expected in a doctor?

7

I AM THE ASSASSIN

Bernice had always felt at a disadvantage in near-zero gravity

- many academics did. It was no doubt a question of gravity

equalling gravitas. Keeping your feet under the plastic rungs,

or on the magnetic strip, or Velcroed to the nano-hooks of the

plush-pile carpeting of the cheaper shuttles, had never had

the proverbial force of keeping your feet on the ground. She

suspected that Johansen knew that as well as she did, and

had chosen to opt to exclude the bridge area from the ship‟s

microgravity field solely to discourage visits from non-crew

members.

Johansen hovered in midair, unfettered by any restraints,

while Bernice, her feet wedged under the iron rungs, fell the

stomach-twitching discomfort that came from trying to talk to

someone sixty degrees out of synchronization with her

subjective up and down.

„So,‟ Captain Johansen said sternly, „exactly when were you

going to tell me that Tenomi had been poisoned?‟

„There just didn‟t seem to be any point telling you until he

was coming round,‟ Bernice said testily. She felt rather hard

done by that she was being berated for not taking the

poisoning seriously. Johansen had not just had to put up

with Jane Steadman‟s „Oh, he‟s only poisoned - try not to

worry‟ advice. Bernice could really have done with the

doctor‟s support now.

„Where is he now?‟ the captain asked.

„In the medical unit.‟

„Alone?‟

„Well yes, he‟s resting.‟

„I can‟t believe that Jane let you leave someone unguarded

who had just been the victim of an attempted poisoning.

Where is she?‟

„She came up with me to speak to you, but there was a call

for her from forward ops on the way here and she stopped off

below.‟

Captain Johansen scowled. „I‟ll get the story from her. You

get back and watch Tenomi. Day and night if need be. He‟s

the key to successful commercial exploitation of Canopus IV,

and more importantly a guest on my ship. I will not have him

killed. Is that clear?‟

Bernice looked at the captain. That was the first sensible

thing she had known her to say. „I‟ll head back there now.‟

„Good idea. Forget day and night, though. I was only

sounding off. I‟ll get David to take a shift when he‟s done with

the mess duties.‟

Bernice smiled to herself as she hurried out. David

Foreman, the ship‟s landing-shuttle pilot, had volunteered to

try to coax better food out of the ship‟s processing machinery,

until his flying skills were needed. He had a theory that he

could get it to produce passable muffins but so far all that

had come out was a thick liquid toffee slurry. Guard duty for

him had to be safer for everyone‟s teeth than giving him time

to tinker with the autochefs. That thought and getting back

to common gravity made her almost cheerful, despite the

attack on Tenomi. Perhaps she should feel guilty about that,

but she couldn‟t manage it. Suspect it might be, but

something in her needed action, excitement, maybe even

danger. She just hoped that she wasn‟t going to get too much

of it this time.

In the medical room, a figure swathed in darkness made

his way to the controls to the room‟s environmental systems.

From here a sufficiently skilful programmer could set the

room to have the characteristics of a hundred base-line

atmospheres. It was a low-tech medical room, typical of a

second-hand ship or a military one where the crew were

grunts, cheap and replaceable, so the controls could not vary

the atmosphere pressure much beyond half to three times

Earth maximum or handle really corrosive gases. But it was

flexible enough for what the figure had in mind. He could not

have the doctor reviewing those medical scans in greater

detail, lest she learn the truth about her patient‟s condition.

He intended to set a bomb. Not an explosive one, but a

computer bomb: a set of instructions keyed to activate when

particular criteria were met. Then softly and silently he stole

away. When the next living person entered the medical lab, it

would seal shut and flush the oxygenated atmosphere out

into space, replacing it with inert gases. An inert-gas

atmosphere would suffocate anyone, human or Canopusi.

A voice inside the figure‟s head whispered, „Well done;

nothing out of the ordinary there, just solid straightforward

violence.‟ The figure‟s orange-clawed hands punched the last

codes into the device. The artificial skin he had grown from

the Canopusi‟s DNA after he had killed him moved just as

smoothly as living tissue. Indeed, to all intents and purposes

it was alive. It was only what was under it that was dead.

Still, the pretence had as yet fooled all observers; and, now

the donor‟s memory proteins had been finally incorporated

into his available data, there was no reason why the charade

should not continue to be successful, provided the doctor did

not discover too much.

„I think we should abandon this voyage,‟ Doctor Steadman

said simply, addressing the tense muscles of Captain

Johansen‟s back.

„Really?‟ Sandra asked without turning round, seemingly

intent on the star field visible through the forward viewers. It

was of course a computer construct. Visible light does not

travel through FTL space. When she thought that she had let

the doctor sweat long enough she twisted at the waist and

flipped round letting her momentum complete the turn. It

looked impossible, like a cat landing on its feel, but it was

simply a matter of conservation of momentum. In the near-

zero-g bubble of the Captain‟s Room, drawing an arm in

suddenly to the body could send an unskilled spacer into a

tumbling roll. Sandra Johansen was very skilled.

Jane Steadman displayed no surprise at all, but then, this

wasn‟t the first time she had shown off in front of the doctor.

„Why?‟ she continued. „I‟ve just had old Summerfield in

here parroting your no-need-to-worry placebos. Thanks very

much for the second-hand report, by the way. Was it too

much effort to buzz mc? And what the hell do you mean by

leaving Tenomi unguarded?‟

„I didn‟t think you would want an attack on an alien

dignitary announced over the intercom, and you can hardly

blame me for Bernice getting here first. I didn‟t make Antok

wedge his gravharness behind a waste-facility door. This ship

wasn‟t built for multispecies occupancy. And as for guards,

what if I‟d picked the poisoner? I thought Tenomi was just as

safe alone. You know the medical lab has the best security

locks on board.‟

Sandra shrugged, and the muscular reactions lifted her a

fraction.

„What really happened, Jane? Why are you scared? It isn‟t

like you to want to give up on a mission. Don‟t you remember

the asteroid-mine runs off Honspar when the Tenairium

Cartels were on one hemisphere of us, and the Anti-

Smuggling Corp on the other, and the damn von Neumann

worms in the hold were eating the ship out from under us?‟

„No I don‟t. Not in those terms anyway. I remember being

scared and overworked and cramped into old, smelly, third-

rate space gear. I remember being taken for granted. I don‟t

remember having a killer on board.‟

„I thought you told Bernice that Tenomi wasn‟t in any

danger.‟

„Not this time, no, if you count shitting out a stomach and

having my hands up to my elbows in his pseudo-solar-plexus

as a friendly massage. I guess I could advertise it as an

advanced weight-loss programme. I‟d probably even get some

takers among the more perverted royals on Divine Right.‟

„But?‟

„Oh yes, the but. But what next? That‟s the but. No amount

of fancy internal redundancy will protect our guest from

having a blaster pushed up his skinny rear. Or what about a

big bomb? Fizz pop! and suddenly we‟re traversing

hyperspace without a hull. I know that there‟s a big prize for

anyone who can verify the conjectural basis of hyperdrive,

but I don‟t want to experiment in person.‟

„Calm down. You‟re overwrought.‟

„No, I‟m merely cautious. Let‟s go back, pick up a less high-

up cleric, someone that isn‟t at the top of the tree waiting for

the monkeys below to work out which branches to snap. And,

while we‟re there, a bigger ship wouldn‟t go amiss, preferably

one with high-tech weapons. We‟re flying into nothing we‟ve

ever seen before, Sandra, and yes you could say I‟m scared.

You can say worse than that if you want. Just don‟t let your

desire to be braver than the shit-scared ship‟s doctor blind

you to how dumb you‟re being.‟

„Wait.‟ Sandra began wondering if she had alienated her old

friend irretrievably, but before she could formulate an

apology, before she was even sure she wanted to apologize,

Jane was gone.

Bernice was halfway to the medical lab when Geth, hurrying

in the opposite direction, collided with her and knocked her

down. He was still wearing the sculpted ceremonial body

armour that he had brought aboard with him, and Bernice

had almost felt her ribs crack. This was the genuine article –

real dense metal.

„Look where you‟re going, can‟t you?‟ they both said,

practically at once.

Bernice glared at the reptile. „What‟s up with you? Where‟s

the fire?‟

„There‟s a fire?‟ Geth looked around wildly. „Are these ships

safe? How can we flee from fire in these metal walls?‟

The archaeologist felt a twinge of sympathy. She had felt

out of her element on the bridge because she didn‟t have the

raw space experience of the captain, but Geth was even

worse off. He had been uprooted from his world and torn at

unbelievable velocities through space heading not only for

another world - although that was surely dislocating enough

for anyone who hadn‟t spent a decade training for Apollo, or

a childhood watching the freighters come and go in the sky

from distant planets with skies like gems - but for a different

spiritual state. He was heading for the Gods, and, Bernice

thought, he looked rationally upset about the whole idea. It

was surprising really that Tenomi had taken it so well, unless

it had been the shock of travel and not the slightly different

components of ship‟s air that had confined him to his cabin

for so long. She noticed that Geth had never shown any

allergic symptoms.

„It‟s just an expression,‟ she said. „A proverbial saying.

Surely you must have some. Holy truth passed down from

visions?‟

„Ah yes. I see. You say “Where is the fire?” meaning “What

is my urgency?” just as I might say “Whose sandstrider is

loose in the kraal?” or “What susgrakk had hold of my

grandfather‟s tail?”„

„Yes, and?‟

„And?‟

„And where is the fire?‟

„I have just passed the medical lab. Tenomi is not there. I

am hurrying to check his quarters in case he is still dazed

from the loss of tissue.‟

„You went into the lab?‟

„No, I merely looked through the glass in the doors, but

there was no sign of him.‟

„You check his room, I‟ll take a proper look round the lab.

He might have fallen and been out of sight from the door.‟

„Perhaps you should page the doctor, let her investigate.

What if he is there and in need of treatment?‟

„She‟s up in forward ops, or was. You try to get her on the

intercom, I‟ll go on ahead.‟

Bernice didn‟t wait for Geth‟s protests. He seemed

indecisive, surrounded by things outside his grasp, but she

couldn‟t afford to feel like that: she needed to know. She

needed to know who was trying to kill Tenomi. She needed to

know where he was. She started to run.

From the memoirs of Professor Malkovitch Fellows

Ten days after our landing (hereinafter 10 AOL) on Canopus

IV we separated the expedition into two units: one travelling

with native auxiliaries, to wit the Priest-King Tenomi III and

his secretary Geth Kathath, and using the transport ship

Second-Best Buy as a resource, would use the inscripted

astronomical evidence which we had recovered from the

lower exterior hieroglyphic records in an attempt to discover

the home planet of the Spire‟s builders. The remainder -

which, I may say, I considered to be the core of the expedition

proper - would begin the physical mapping and analysis of

the Spire itself with particular focus on determining the

reasons for the anomalous dark matter, gravitic and temporal

readings associated with the structure.

Naturally I was deeply saddened to be separated from the

estimable company of Professor Bernice Summerfield, whose

ebullient personality had so altered the morale of the entire

expedition during the long trip to Canopus IV, but I accepted

that her skills would be best deployed a long way away from

the drab domain of pure physics.

Extract ends

Professor Fellows was feeling uncharacteristically cheerful. It

was eight days now since the Second-Best Buy had left. Eight

days without Summerfield! And everything was going

splendidly - just as he had known it would as soon as she

was off planet and out of his hair. Oh, she had whined, she

had wheedled, she had batted her eyelashes like a Laviscian

trollop, and she had threatened him with a knuckle

sandwich, but she had gone.

A shame, true, that Sandra had to go with her, Fellows

thought, but then if a chap could not exercise monastic

restraint in what was basically, however alien, a monastery,

then he clearly was no better than the beasts that perish.

Besides, Sandra was in charge of the ship, and would

doubtless be needed to stop Summerfield rubbing the High

Priest up the wrong way.

Everything else was ticking along well.

Danson and Vane had set up telemetric and tetrahertz

scanners in the main body of the Spire and were conducting

tests. So far all the results were within the parameters

predicted by theory. There was definite gravitic vectorization

taking place along the axis of the main cylinder. That fitted

the dark-matter predictions, with only the minimum of

fudging.

Despite Malkovitch‟s insistence that the team concentrate

on hard fact, some of the students were claiming to have

made exciting discoveries in the strata below the Spire during

soundings to determine the extent of any subterranean

structure. There were primitive fossilized Canopusi remains

in the fossil record that had built up around the Spire

foundation. Hardly any wonder, the students said, that the

indigens took the structure as evidence for God. It was far

more spectacular than a volcano or a periodic recurrence of

locusts.

Malkovitch had testily ordered them back to the

contemporary work. The irreverence of their comments had

grated on his childhood faith; besides he had not rid the

expedition of one unnecessary archaeologist to have another

generation spring up underfoot.

„It‟s grossly unfair,‟ Delcorii snivelled to a barely listening

Elspet. „Those remains stand in relation to the existing

Canopusi as Fendleman‟s Man does to modern Homo sapiens.

We could have had two, maybe three, papers from that, and

sell the expedition records on a multidisciplinary front.‟

Elspet looked up. „What? “A partial solution to the Dark

Matter problem, together with some notes on the evolutionary

development of a reptile/mammal hybrizoid”? Sell well

among biologically minded astrophysicists.‟

Delcorii blinked her violet eye at him, and uttered a shrill

Centauri whistle of disapproval.

„I didn‟t expect such a reactionary narrow response from

you. Surely you must feel equally aggrieved at Fellows‟

disregard for your linguistic researches.‟

„Look around!‟ Elspet said urgently. „What do you see?‟

„Monastic quarters, very like those the Canopusi made

available to me.‟

„And?‟

„Dirt?‟

„Any number of cultural and totemic reference points!‟

„Oh, those.‟

„Yes those. You don‟t see them, Fellows doesn‟t see them,

but I’m trying to.‟ Elspet sighed. „Malkovitch isn‟t a bad man,

not even a bad scientist, but he knows just enough about

everything to think he knows it all, and outside his own

discipline that can be dangerous. Except that this is a

physics expedition paid for with the prospect of physical

exports. From his viewpoint he‟s quite right to ignore a

deeper translation of the native languages if he can sidestep

the problem by relying on their visionary knowledge. He‟s

also right to leave the bodies for proper archaeologists.‟

„If you‟re going to be insulting, I‟ll leave.‟

From the memoirs of Professor Malkovitch Fellows

By 25 AOL, with guidance from the native priesthood, we

began a controlled assent into the upper interior of the Spire.

It was necessary to construct three encampments with

provisions and tents on the narrow wooden stairs and ledges

that spiral around the inner wall of the Spire before

contacting the support structure of the inner cylinder. A

diagram of the Spire‟s architecture may be found in Annexe

A, but it may be simplified as follows:

Imagine a long cylinder buried in the earth - in fact the

Spire consists of more than one cylinder and is externally

buttressed and tapers to a point, but for the purposes of this

description a cylinder will suffice. From the inner wall of the

cylinder stiff wires extend into the centre supporting another

smaller cylinder which ends three-quarters of the way down

from the top. Now imagine that someone had taken a pen

and drawn a line spiralling down from the lowest of the wires

to the floor of the outer cylinder. That line is the staircase we

climbed.

The climb itself revealed further detail impossible to resolve

from ground level. Firstly, the material of the Spire, both the

inner and outer cylinders, is not solid but a kind of trellis or

latticework constructed mainly out of carefully aligned

futurite crystals.

The entirely predictable effects of something this large on

the macro-weather patterns in its immediate vicinity meant

that constant thunderstorms rolled outside the outer wall

and cast shadows through this lattice on to the interior

cylinder. The effect was almost hypnotic.

A suggestion made by Doctor Jabez Peterson that the

flickering may have acted as a Ginsbergian dream machine

strobing at Canopusi hypnotic frequencies and that it might

have contributed to religious visions in the monks will be

published separately from the results of this expedition,

which are concerned with the physical structure of the Spire

and the effects of its operation.

Professor Lochlin, whose contribution to the expedition‟s

finances has already been praised in my introduction, and

whose other personal contributions I record in the dedication

to this volume of my memoirs, was sadly unable to

accompany us for the whole of the assent due to ill health.

Extract ends

Malkovitch felt a stab of annoyance. It was not that he could

not feel sympathy for sufferers from irrational fears. Even

though he had no fear of heights himself, he nevertheless

understood that such a fear could not be conquered with the

medical equipment at hand. The annoyance came from the

fact that Professor Lochlin had come this far without

expressing any discomfort whatsoever and that now his

nauseating breakdown was holding up the crossing into the

inner cylinder.

From a letter written by Professor Lochlin (unsent)

I was able to persuade a priest to take me down. I was

physically and psychically unable to cross into the interior of

the Spire.

It was not the height.

In my earlier letters I have described the Spire in detail but

I may not have stressed that actually the space between the

inner cylinder and the walls is often slight. The cylinders are

not precisely regular and bulge in places, leading to narrower

gaps of which this was the first within reach of the Canopusi

construct. I should not let the scale of the Spire detract from

the skill with which the natives have woven this framework of

steps up the walls. We were, I would judge, at least six times

higher than the great pyramid of Cheops, and whereas Egypt

- cretins like von Daniken to the contrary – actually exported

wood and had no shortage for rollers, all of the materials for

these stairs must have been hauled across the desert from

the south. A colossal undertaking. My admiration for the

natives grows and grows.

I had therefore no fear that they would not have secured

the plank firmly; nor, despite the size of the Spire and the

gaps in its walls, is there any wind or weather within the

building. How this is achieved is another mystery; I mention

it merely to defend myself against the obvious cries that I

should have proceeded.

My reason for returning to the planetary surface was

simply this. For two nights before, I dreamt of falling from

that very plank. Falling and dying. If anyone tells you that if

you hit the ground at the end of a falling dream you die in

real life, don‟t believe them; it isn‟t true. However, it is

exceedingly unpleasant.

I suggest you get another agent here as soon as possible if

you wish detailed reports on the upper Spire aside from what

I will be able to obtain from the diligent if unimaginative

Fellows.

I remain yours faithfully

Professor Jervis Lochlin

Knowledge Above All.

Extract ends

Professor Fellows stepped off the plank. He had elected to

come last. So he stepped off not into majestic silence but into

a gabbling set of scholarly conversations as the new data

about the interior of the Spire was woven into a dozen

competing theories.

„From the size of these stairs, which are part of the original

structure, I‟d judge that the Vo‟lach would be larger than a

man and wider,‟ Vane was saying.

„That fits in with the statues on the plain below,‟ Elspet

agreed. He glanced down the side of the plank at the almost

invisible dots of primary colour that were the four statues.

„You don‟t still maintain those are Vo‟lach?‟ Danson said

sarcastically. „Giant cuddly aliens don‟t fit in with the Evil

Arms Merchants of contemporary galactic myth, nor yet are

they evidently obviously godlike.‟

„The Canopusi say those are Vo‟lach.‟ Elspet shrugged. „I‟m

inclined to take them at their word.‟

„Come on, come on. gentlemen, ladies,‟ Fellows bustled.

„We‟ve been through these discussions already. Once we have

hard facts from scans of the upper Spire we‟ll then be able to

start answering questions rather than asking them.‟ He

pushed them forward with flapping motions of his hands as if

they were children. Really, sometimes he thought he was the

only member of the expedition left on the planet with any

responsibility at all.

The statues were a common over-meal discussion point

simply because they were so odd that practically any theory

seemed to find some point of validity in respect of their podgy

childlike innocence.

Duquincy, who considered himself a fair amateur biologist,

thought that the statues were Canopusi attempts to depict

the forces of nature - earth, air, fire, water - as nothing that

vividly coloured would stand a chance in evolutionary terms.

Peterson thought the four statues indicated that the

Vo‟lach were quadra-sexual, and that the differently

patterned horns or antennae might be sexual displays if not

actual sex organs.

Lochlin took the middle ground. He thought the statues

were authentic Vo‟lach artefacts brought to the base of the

stairway after its construction by the Canopusi, and

suggested that they indicate that the Vo‟lach had entered a

period of leisure and personalized genetic modification before

they came to Canopus IV. In so far as he bothered with this

nonsense, Fellows was inclined to Lochlin‟s theory. Jervis

could be quite sensible provided he was kept away from

catastrophic astrophysics; and his money was a very

welcome addition to the expedition budget, even if his fear of

heights had lost them some time.

From the memoirs of Professor Malkovitch Fellows

28 AOL. I have had, I fear, to divert my narrative from the dry

factual style in which all good scientific matters should be

conducted. Like Archimedes discovering a use for the

displacement of water, I was, and am, forced to cry Eureka!

The interior of the inner Spire was not normal matter. The

importance of this cannot be made clear enough. Even the

odd material of its exterior is in essence composed of normal

materials that have been strengthened. The interior is quite

different.

While my readings - from a distance, from orbit and from

within the Spire itself - had prepared mc to discover a source

of dark matter and hence a solution to its constitution, I was,

I must confess, ill prepared for the visual spectacle we

discovered.

The core of the Spire was a pillar of fire.

The mean particle count derived from a twenty-four-hour

study can be found in Annexe B. To summarize, we

discovered that the „firestorm‟ begins at the apex of the Spire

and disappears again within a nanometre of the apparent

floor of the inner cylinder. The colour of the fire ranged from

purple to a deep blue, not unlike Cherenkov radiation.

After that study was concluded we were in a position to

slate firmly that either the particle stream was composed of

antimatter - in which case the Spire, no matter what its

construction, should have been blown to bits the moment the

phenomenon began - or, as I had suspected from the first

strange readings, it was composed of ordinary matter

travelling back in time at speeds in excess of that of light.

The natives offered to show me a ritual which had been

carried out over generations to venerate the flame. Despite

my misgivings at mixing anthropology and hard science, I

agreed to accompany them higher.

Extract ends

Bernice pushed open the door of the medical lab, and halted

suddenly. From Geth‟s account she had expected to find the

rooms deserted but Dr Steadman was already there

nonchalantly mixing something in a beaker. Behind her the

door sealed shut, but Bernice, her eyes on Jane‟s flushed

face, did not notice the mechanisms splicing it airtight. There

was no sign of Tenomi - Geth had been right about that.

„Nostrum?‟ Bernice asked.

„Bloody Mary,‟ Jane said sourly. „I don‟t suppose you‟ve

seen Tenomi. I told him to rest, but he was gone when I got

back. No one seems to want to listen to me on this ship.‟

Bernice coughed nervously. The room seemed hot and

close. Her loose ship‟s tunic and slacks were heavy on her

limbs, heavy as the gold armour that the young lizard had

been wearing. What was his name? A thundering headache

was gathering behind her eyes, but oddly, distantly, she

knew it did not matter.

As she fell she had time to wonder only one thing: why was

Dr Steadman just standing there watching as if she was a

specimen rather than a patient?

A thick grey blanket of fog like a cloud in her brain shut

out the medical lights, and she stopped breathing.

8

DOCTOR AT LARGE

Dr Steadman stepped calmly over Bernice‟s body and

considered the door. It was molecularly locked, the edges

atomically joined to the ship‟s walls. Plague alerts should

have been sounding - doubtless they had been shorted out to

prevent help arriving.

Under the artificial skin of the ship‟s surgeon, the

Negotiator froze as conflicting commands locked in its

circuitry. Its primary goals, like those of all Vo‟lach

machinery, were sacrosanct and in its logical pathways

actions directly connected to those goals were priority-

flagged; but, while it could not be said to consider, it had

some leeway in areas of non-priority tasks.

It could not be said to think, but it could resolve

difficulties.

One method of doing so would be to wait. Bernice would

die. Then there would be no need to decide whether or not to

save her. It rejected that. If Bernice died it would still either

have to leave the room or stay. If it stayed it would be

discovered in a room with no oxygen with a dead human. It

did not need to think to calculate that being discovered in

such circumstances would badly damage its credibility as an

infiltrator. If it left and Bernice was dead, then the mystery of

the death would prompt investigation.

It acted.

* * *

From the memoirs of Professor Malkovitch Fellows

31 AOL. After the discoveries we had made in the Spire, some

of the expedition members seemed to find it almost hard to

voluntarily descend to ground level, but as I rightly argued

the automatic monitors we had placed in the Upper Spire

would be able to gather objective information.

As it was, our descent took us not to a place where an

ordered codification of our various observations could be

compiled but into a maelstrom, or perhaps into the

madhouse. Hitherto we had, and I flatter myself that my

diplomatic skills had no small matter to do with it, the full

support of the natives. When we had left with our friendly

priests guiding us, the population of the Spire and the

buildings of the religious and secular community - for not

everyone here is a priest; some must sow and some must

spin, after all - around it was full of Tenomi‟s mission. The

knowledge that great truths would be discovered, that

something wonderful might be found, had galvanized them

into great festive preparations.

While we were gone, something had turned that mood

inside out.

The soldiers were waiting for us when we came down. Not

that they called themselves soldiers of course. They wore red

cloaks and chunky gold ornamental armour and they carried

herdsmen‟s spears tipped with futurite. It did not take a man

with my grasp of political intrigue to guess that they took

their orders from Tenomi‟s second-in-command, a dried-up

stick of a Canopusi called Mandir. They reminded me of the

Cardinal‟s guards from The Three Musketeers, which I

supposed made Mandir the Richelieu equivalent. In the

interest of safeguarding the expedition, I naturally demanded

an immediate audience.

Extract ends

Almost absently the Vo‟lach machine strapped breathing

apparatus to Bernice‟s mouth and nose while at the same

time giving her an injection of anaesthetic. Now it had

removed the element of urgency from the problem, Bernice

would live - unless the greater aim demanded her

destruction.

It worked through the probabilities without impatience,

without thought. It had aims. It had methods. It had

checking mechanisms; it did not need to think.

The attack - a primitive reprogramming of the lab itself

triggered by the presence of a sufficient organic mass, the

human known as Bernice - was clearly designed to kill

organics. That, the Negotiator concluded, meant its

impersonation of the doctor was not detected; assuming that

it was the target. The probability that it might have been

detected was low - all the medical and most of the

biographical data it had needed to impersonate the doctor

had been on file in the memory circuits of her black bag. The

most likely route to discovery was the continued existence of

the doctor herself. It had left her trussed up in a comer of the

Spire, with a supply of food, water and air but with no means

of escape. It had been a calculated risk. The great aim

implied that she should have been killed, but the implicit

value of the aim required that she be preserved. Its reaction -

never a choice - had been not to kill her. Its reaction had

been the result of balancing the probable disruption to the

great aim if it was detected as an imposter against the

resistance it was designed to feel to the extinction of non-

Vo‟lach life.

The detection probability produced by not killing the doctor

had been reduced by planting a detector inside the ship‟s

hypercommunications equipment, a device that did nothing

but decode incoming signals and look for Dr Steadman‟s

name. If it found her name it would fuse the portion of the

ship‟s computers that handled the complex decoding of

subspace squirts into a hot ball of dull grey metal. Of course

the possibility that that mechanism might itself be detected

had also had to be factored into the calculations but it still

produced an overall lesser risk of exposure.

The attack had been an unsophisticated one, but its

existence was suggestive. If it was not that the unit‟s disguise

had been penetrated then the reason for the attack must be

itself illicit - the action of someone determined to prevent a

discovery that „Doctor Steadman‟ might otherwise make.

Perhaps it was not the only imposter aboard.

The logical chain hit a checking value counter that

suggested that it was leaving the main issue: how best to

preserve its cover.

The human grunted in her sleep.

Mandir was waiting for Professor Fellows in a room the size

and height of an intercontinental bullet train - one that had

been stood on end. The height made the room‟s tiny floor

space almost infinitely oppressive, and its air was dank and

cloying.

In the centre a body lay in state covered by a thin sheet of

animal hide. So small was the room that Mandir‟s tail arched

over the body, twitching. The sheet was crisscrossed with

tiny, tiny stitches. Under the shadow of Mandir‟s tail they

seemed to move.

„The cauls of baby sandstriders,‟ Mandir said, seeing his

interest, „cured in the venom of the Defarg, and sewn

together. According to the Scarlet Rite, it offers the soul

insight into the world to come as it leaves the body. In this

case we did not of course find the body until consciousness

had long gone. Still, it is a matter of respect.‟

„How did it die?‟ Fellows asked. He could see the bulk of a

Canopusi body under the sheet, and he had been tempted to

ask who it was but in the nervous pit of his stomach he could

feel who it was even though he did not understand how. The

dead Canopusi was supposed to be light years away, on the

way to the Gods‟ world.

„Well you may ask.‟ Mandir‟s tail swished round, grazing

the edge of the bier, before pointing, tip a tremble, at Fellows.

„He was killed with weaponry never seen before on this

planet. Your expedition‟s weaponry, I have no doubt. Under

the circumstances, I have asked my priest-guards to

maintain order. I will have to ask you to cooperate with my

questioning.‟

„Certainly, ah. Officer?‟ Fellows hazarded.

Mandir grinned, displaying teeth in a way that Fellows had

never before observed in a Canopusi. „No, I have no military

titles. We have seen such things in the future but Tenomi in

his wisdom placed a ban on all such knowledge. I am High

Priest now, no more, no less.‟

„Right,‟ Fellows said warily. He wasn‟t sure if this was a

coup or not. Among earth-descended cultures it would look

like a forceful change of government; but the body itself was

evidence enough that something strange was going on.

„Tell me,‟ Mandir asked, apparently changing the subject,

„do you think Tenomi was right? Is there any forbidden

knowledge, anything that Canopusi or men were not meant

to know?‟

Fellows brightened. This was more in his line. Scientific

ethics. „No,‟ he said firmly. „There are things we might be

wrong to do with our knowledge, but I can‟t believe in gods

who equate innocence with ignorance.‟

„My view exactly,‟ Mandir said smiling.

The Negotiator was still considering, grinding facts through

its internal slow mills. It could reset the atmosphere controls,

and break down the door. The plan was rated B-plus. The

force necessary to breach the door would be considerably in

excess of human strength, even allowing for a hysterical

override of the normal blocks that prevent people tearing

their muscles away from their bones. Bernice was an

observant person. Consequently there was a seventy-five-

percent-plus probability that its inhumanity would be

deduced; logically it needed to divert attention away from

itself.

It removed the oxygen mask from Bernice‟s face and wiped

from it the pseudo-fingerprints left by its fingers. Then,

wearing surgical gloves, it put it back in Bernice‟s hand,

wedged clumsily against her face. It gave her a carefully

measured pressure injection of antidote to the anaesthetic.

Before she could recover, the Negotiator stripped the gloves

from its hands and turned on the intercom.

„Help. Medical emergency. Medical lab. We‟re sealed in.

Oxygen levels falling. Only enough for...‟ It let its voice trail

away.

Bernice began to gasp, sucking in great lungfuls of the

oxygen mixture, but she was still in carbon-dioxide-intensity

shock. The Negotiator calculated that it had thirty seconds

before the organic‟s systems were fully back on line. Of

course this posed a further problem. It could not permit its

freedom of action to be curtailed, or it would no longer be

able to preserve the greatest good of the greatest number. It

activated the second part of its plan.

It shut down all its external mimicry functions, and let its

apparently organic shell appear to enter a deep coma. In

such a state it would not be suspected, and the organics‟

worries would be defused until such a time as it became

possible to [programming conflict area] them. There was a

slight chance that a surgical investigation of its body might

be carried out, but it discounted that as unlikely: first,

because it would seem to be stable; secondly, because there

was no other qualified medical practitioner on board; and

thirdly, because the ship was due to arrive at Vo‟lach Prime

in the next few days. They would be too busy there to spare

time for speculative medicine.

The guard was one of Mandir‟s most trusted officers.

„I brought the news myself, Elect,‟ he said. „The officer who

made the discovery is outside. I have ensured that he has

had no opportunity to confide it in anyone.‟

„Most interesting. Take the human doctor into our custody

and keep her safe. She may be of use. As for the officer who

discovered her...‟ Mandir paused and drummed his fingers on

the razor-sharp shard of futurite he carried at his belt. „See

that he is appropriately rewarded.‟

9

HIGH DUNGEON

Professor Fellows paced his cell, and cursed. Why, oh why,

had he never learnt to guard his tongue? As a result of his

interview with Mandir, he and the rest of the surviving

members of the expedition were now Mandir‟s military think

tank.

The one who had not survived was poor Lochlin. Silly old

Lochlin with his daft theories that meant everyone was so

condescending to him, and he never minded, or at least he

never let on that he minded. He always had a joke. His

stuffiness was part of his humour, an intentional shell

between him and what Fellows supposed was often an

uncaring world. Certainly the part Lochlin had hit hadn‟t

cared.

Mandir had decided that the inner Spire was the only safe

place for its scientists. Security, Mandir had said. Until it

could be determined who the killer was, all aliens were

suspect. The population might try to take the law into its own

claws.

Lochlin had not wanted to go and had raved not about

heights but about dreams of falling. Fellows had almost

expected the priests to understand that; they all dreamt and

surely not all their dreams were of things devoutly to be

wished. But they had still made him climb. Fellows knew now

what a Canopusi snigger sounded like. It wasn‟t a pretty

sound.

Irony demanded that Lochlin fall from the plank, at the

point where he claimed that his slip would come, but actually

he didn‟t. It was long before he had climbed that high;

Fellows suspected Lochlin had done it deliberately. The long,

slow climb up to the plank must have been, well, „soul-

destroying‟ in its most literal sense. Perhaps there had come

a point at which death now was preferable to another step

towards death later. Fellows wondered if that was the

fulcrum on which the lever of suicide always pivoted.

He turned again as his stride hit the wall. He, and

presumably the others, had been imprisoned in narrow cells

around the outside of the inner cylinder, spiralling upward.

From here he could see both the exterior and the fire at the

heart of the Spire, as luminous shadows through the lattice

walls.

When Fellows had been a child he had been told a story of

a man who went to hell, although for a time he believed it to

be heaven for he had there every material possession for

which his heart had longed. Eventually, however, he

discovered that there was no savour in anything he did there

and finally an angel discovered him crouching in the attic of

his citadel in hell, his eye pressed, as it had been for a

million years, against the one crack that let in light from

heaven. That was what the fire at the core of the Spire looked

like from his cell. It looked like the only real thing Fellows

had ever seen.

Some days passed. He could not even scratch the walls to

make a calendar. Instead he did what Mandir wanted. He

studied. He wondered if the others were doing the same.

In his cell Elspet Fitzpatrick held up the ancient parchment

against the glowing white girder. The parchment was thin as

chiffon. On its surface straight black runes made

conjunctions at perfect angles. The marks were, he finally

decided, a mixture of Old Norse and Middle Period Martian.

He knew enough of each to know that he had no chance of

translating well enough to make any real sense of the text. It

seemed to be all metaphor anyway - full of references to

wolves eating the moon and the years of the great sterility,

but written in a future tense.

The Canopusi had devised an appropriate method of

coercing the cooperation of a scholar, he thought wryly.

Boredom, not fear, was ensuring that he was doing exactly

what Mandir wanted. That and the memory of Lochlin‟s fall.

It had taken at least a week since his incarceration, if he

could judge from the fluttering scraps of shadow that made

their way into the Spire‟s interior, and frequency of the

irregular meals that were left without comment by the priest-

guards. There was no true night here: everything was as

coldly luminous as if he had been pent up in moonlight.

Finally he had sorted all the material into groups ranging

from the utterly incomprehensible - stick-men drawings with

the heads of elephants and fragments of ruby-red pigment

carefully ringing their heads in haloes of scarlet – through

the identifiable but incomprehensible, like the linear runes

he had just laid by, to the neat strokes of twentieth-century

English and its modern descendants and finally the scholarly

language in which Dellah conducted most of its business.

The „Ghost Languages‟ of the future that the priests of the

Spire gabbled in their mystic trances were not just

glossolalia. There really was data flowing down the Spire from

the future, and the priests had been recording it so long that

quite a bit of it was about the past. Not exclusively Earth‟s

past: indeed most of the material came - Elspet supposed -

from other civilizations; but even when the priests had not

been able to grasp enough of a Ghost Language to identify

the part of the future from which the data came, there were

still patterns, kinds of meaning.

The cell was a sparse concavity in the gleaming white

girders of the Spire‟s internal construction, between the

aurora lights of the stratosphere to his left, and the searing

actinic blowtorch of the Time Flame to his right. Outside the

long, worn, wooden stairs of the Canopusi Spire Explorers led

down, six, seven, maybe up to nine hundred metres to

ground level. He had lost count when they had brought him

up after the seven thousandth stair.

The only darkness there was in writing. The cell was

crammed with scrolls and tablets, some mere jottings, others

already hedged about with a thousand commentaries and

criticisms.

This was one of Mandir‟s repositories. A storehouse for all

the forbidden texts, the hidden prophesies, the black

knowledge, the incomprehensible esoterica of a thousand

years of blind telepathic resonance. Everything written about

weapons, everything written about war, all the material that

Tenomi had ordered destroyed on his accession to the Priest-

King‟s throne, had been gathered up in secret by the agents

of Mandir‟s antifaith, and carried up into the heights.

If Elspet wanted to live he was expected to make sense of it.

In fact it was clear from Mandir‟s sneers as the crippled

priest had worked home the iron bolts on the wooden door -

how many hours of labour had been wasted hoisting the

wood this high into the Spire? he had wondered - that he was

expected not to make sense of any of it. He was expected to

fail.

He reached for another manuscript. This one was in

English, a strange, odd English that he guessed was roughly

that of Chaucer‟s time.

Guard-Priest Kraal Envor uttered a sibilant hiss as the

banging broke out again from within the improvised cell. He

slid back the shutter that covered the translucent window of

hammered Ulgra scales. The Fellows creature within pressed

its moist pink face against the scales imprinting a hexagonal

pattern into its spongy flesh. It made Envor feel sick to see

this podgy travesty of the bipedal form of proper life trying to

act like a scholar. The sooner that Mandir ordered its

destruction the better he would like it.

„I need more paper, and reed ink if I am to complete my

calculations,‟ it said in its high piping voice. Envor recognized

its speech as one of the Ghost Languages - perhaps the

single commonest one that the Gods had sent from the

future. The realization made Envor feel even more disgusted.

Surely this pallid monstrosity was not the future that the

Gods had planned. The instinctive heresy made Envor

shudder. It was hard for all Mandir‟s teachings to refute the

indoctrination of his youth. For a moment he had forgotten

that the Gods were dead.

He scraped his claws over the window scales, so that only

their thickness kept the creature‟s pink flesh from being

sliced open. „I will return with what you need. Do not cease to

work. We will need weapons. To provide them is your only

purpose. If you fail, Mandir will not be so merciful as to give

you to me to kill.‟

In his cell. Fellows shrugged. He had been grossly

intimidated by the guards at first but as the days passed he

had discovered that it was physically impossible to retain

that level of fear for every instant. The fact that they had not

killed, injured, or even seriously threatened him made him

wonder if the authority that Mandir had claimed was actually

supported by the majority of the priesthood. It was hard to

believe that Mandir could be popular as a leader. Still,

Fellows mused, Hitler must have seemed a pretty

unpromising candidate for a demagogue at first.

Mandir came the next day, assuming that Fellows‟ rumbling

stomach was any guide to the passage of light and dark.

„What have you to tell me?‟ he demanded curtly. Evidently

Mandir was no longer insecure enough to waste courtesy on

aliens.

„I know how the Spire works,‟ Fellows said quietly. It wasn‟t

what he had been asked to find out, but perhaps it might

have some value. It was the truth after all, and he had always

believed that the truth had to count for something.

„Indeed.‟

„First I have to explain that my people have mapped the

stars and we know from how they move that there must be

much of the universe, perhaps as much as ninety per cent,

that is not in the form of visible stars. We call this “missing

mass” dark matter, and for a long time we have argued about

its nature.‟

„Really.‟

„I had a theory that it might be tachyonic - real matter

travelling faster than light. There are equations that tell us

what such material would be like. To it, the speed of light -

which we think is the highest speed a physical mass can

travel in normal space - would be a barrier in reverse. A zero-

energy tachyon would have infinite velocity, and it would take

infinite energy to slow one down to the speed of light. They

would also have rest masses calculated as imaginary

numbers, and travel naturally back in time from the point of

their creation.‟

„What is an imaginary number?‟ Mandir asked. „I am not

seeking imaginary answers.‟ He flexed his claws ominously.

„Or other lies.‟

Fellows wondered if he ought to carry on. Mandir wanted

weapons, and all Fellows could offer was cosmology - all he

could honourably offer. He hoped that the scale of his

discoveries might make Mandir see his ambitions in their

true dimensions. It was a narrow scientist‟s hope - a

microscopic hope. It amounted to thinking that the scientists

who worked on the V2s could have talked Hitler out of the

holocaust by describing the peaceful uses of rocketry. But it

had to be tried.

Imaginary numbers are the square roots of minus

numbers. They are neither positive nor negative, or rather

they are both for both minus two times minus two and two

limes two are four.‟ Because imaginary numbers don‟t have

the same obvious existence as ordinary integers, some people

have argued that tachyons also do not exist or, if they do,

they exist in a universe existing somehow aside from ours.

„The Spire proves that isn‟t the case. The light that flows

down the inner, inner cylinder is light from the future, and

not just light but tachyons. The light indeed is a by-product

of the interaction between the Spire and the tachyon stream.

I think the Spire is changing the value of the speed of light

fractionally so that some of the tachyons can cross into the

universe of our perceptions, as light and as exotic particles

and as psionic radiation.‟

„This pleases you?‟ Mandir asked. „To know this?‟

„Yes, because we have been able to detect the gravity waves

given off by the tachyon stream in the Spire and compared it

to that needed to account for the motions of the visible stars.

We know how it works! Tachyons from where the galaxies will

be in the future, travelling back in time, give off antigravitons

and shape the galaxies from the outside, just as gravitons

emitted from baryonic matter travelling forward in time shape

them from inside.‟

Mandir looked at Fellows with smouldering eyes. „These

things, then. These galaxies, if I understand you, are held in

place by forces from the future preventing them from being

now where they will be then?‟

„Yes!‟ Fellows tried to communicate his enthusiasm. All

their lives might depend on it.

Mandir sighed. „I am surrounded by near-sighted fools and

far-sighted madmen. I sometimes feel I am the only sane one

here. Some time ago, I had occasion to wish someone killed.

It was a matter of state. I need not bore you with the details

at this time. I told a soldier whom I trusted to see that the

person was appropriately rewarded, and I laid my hand on

this sharp implement thus. Tell me. Professor Fellows, where

did I go wrong? For today I met my trusted soldier and I said

to him, “Is so and so dealt with?” and he replied, “Yes, I gave

him three sacks of rustin seed from the stores and leave to

see his mother.” Should I punish him who has acted

according to his nature rather than my command?‟

Fellows felt his skin crawling as if he had found something

venomous in his shoes, and yet he heard himself reply,

„Perhaps you were too subtle.‟

Mandir nodded thoughtfully. „Yes, perhaps. I try. I even

learn how to give agreement to your kind with this bobbing.

Yes? I must be clear.‟ He reached out for Fellows‟ left hand,

and carefully, so as to minimize compound fractures, broke

three of his fingers. „Next time, tell me something useful.‟ He

patted Fellows on the head. „It was not uninteresting but I

have heard more believable theology from my own people.

What use is such trash? Teach me things that make a

difference.‟

* * *

After Mandir had left, Fellows bound up his fingers and,

wincing, straightened them as well as he could.

Mandir was wrong. Not only in the sense that he was evil or

that his politics were not those that Fellows supported, but in

the sense that the universe was not organized in the way his

view of the world demanded.

The hotchpotch of future data in all its incomprehensible

forms that Mandir had gathered was interesting but it lacked

the implications of understanding how it had come to be

there.

Fellows‟ theory explained futurite. It was a tachyon-baryon

alloy, a material whose particulate structure was moving

back and forth in time within itself; this accounted for its

immense strength, and time-retarding properties. He was not

sure yet how it had been made, but if his preliminary

calculations were correct it was formed in the Spire itself by

the bombardment of tachyons on the materials of its

construction.

If so, if the only source of futurite was the Spire itself,

where had the pieces come from that the Noun prospectors

had been picking out of the sand for so many years?

He began to tap on the lattice walls of his cell with his good

hand.

10

YOU CAN’T BE TOO CAREFUL

WITH LIFE

From the diary of Professor Bernice Summerfield

Three days of convalescence strapped into an autodoc of the

basic it-beeps-if-you‟re-breathing variety, and the tubes are

out.

Dr Steadman wasn‟t so lucky. Her autodoc printout reads

as if she‟s in a coma, and no one has the medical expertise to

work out why. She was half asphyxiated in her efforts to get

help, having forced the only oxygen mask on to my face, but I

know enough medicine to doubt that could be the whole

cause. The ship brain‟s medical memory is the old Conway-

White standard text: good but it‟s not AI interactive. All we

can do is keep her in suspended animation until we can get

to a medical facility. The ship had some deep-gel cabinets for

transport of live goods just by the shuttle bay. She‟s in aspic

now, like a prawn in a cocktail, and my current middle name

is Mud.

The captain has made no effort to avoid the implication

that she would rather have had a stiff archaeologist and a

living medical officer. I gather they were old friends, which

has pushed the Bernice stock to all-time lows as far as

Sandra Johansen is concerned. This ship is doomed: the

Titanic only hit an iceberg; the Second-Best Buy is captained

by one.

Still there‟s one consolation. At least my vision didn‟t come

true, and, sorry as I am about Jane‟s condition, I‟m sure

she‟d rather be on her way to proper medical care than

unknowingly hanging on for a future of being blown out of an

air lock by yours truly.

Today we‟re due to emerge in normal space at the prime

candidate for the Vo‟lach home system.

With the captain‟s tacit approval, which is to say she had

responded that she wouldn‟t lose any sleep if I was in a

transparently hulled part of the ship when hypothetical

aliens attacked with heavy lasers, I‟ve managed to get Sergei

and David to push my bed into the observation dome (really a

tertiary storage facility that Sandra and Jane had customized

with a hull insert of bubble-formed, zero-refraction laminate

after a particularly successful smuggling run) to watch the

emergence.

The moment of re-entry into the space surrounding a new

star is normally a good time on board ship, and a number of

odd spacer‟s rituals and jokes have grown up around it,

particularly when the star has only been perfunctorily

surveyed in the past. This was the case with most of the stars

of the Northern Cross, with the exception of Epsilon Cygnus,

which lay within a hundred light years of Earth and hence

was on the tourist as well as the serious space routes, so

ordinarily I might have expected libations to Old Father

Space and the Virgin Worlds, and compulsory singing of „Up

the Greasy Pole‟ and other zero-gee anthems.

Not this time. This time I had a bad joke that was spot on.

„Well, it couldn‟t get much sadder,‟ I quipped as the Second-

Best Buy snapped out of hyperdrive on the fringes of the

Gamma Cygnus system.

Sergei chortled, „Is pun, yes? Sadr is name of star.‟

„Is very bad pun,‟ David groaned.

„I just wanted to pre-empt any stupid jokes,‟ Bernice lied.

„You mean like wondering if you‟re going to be bedridden

the whole time or whether the visit is going to be in Cygnus

or in health?‟ David said innocently.

Sergei looked at Bernice and made a noise like a wounded

animal.

We were just trying to distract ourselves from why my joke

had turned out to be so appropriate. The Sadr star system

had been gutted.

In a normal star system you might get a couple of gas

giants, a number of small rocky planets in the orbits capable

of supporting liquid hydrogen oxide - and hence Earth-style

carbon-, hydrogen-, oxygen- and nitrogen-based life, and

thousands of planetesimals, asteroids, rogue moons and

general debris. It isn‟t untidy: it‟s normal, homely, lived in.

The Sadr system had been mined out, and tidied into

oblivion. There were no asteroids in free orbits for a start, at

least none large enough to show up on the ship‟s scopes at

five AUs. There were some asteroidal clusters but these had

been arranged neatly in Lagrange-point micro-orbits ahead of

and behind the planets for ease of space mining. There was

one gas giant left, and its mass was so depleted with the

sieving of elements from its atmosphere that it only just

squeaked into the classification. The inner planets were being

strip-mined, so much so that their orbits verged on the

variable, and one looked more like a slice of Edam rather

than an ordinary world; presumably the vast wound was

being held open against gravitational collapse with pressor

technology to give access to exotic elements in the mantle

and core. It was impressive but it wasn‟t comfortable; it

didn‟t look like the way anyone would treat a star system if

they intended to live in it.

The star wasn‟t even really F8. Despite the ship‟s star

charts, it was really brighter and more energetic, but barely

half of its output was getting past the series of overlapping

screens and solar collectors that crawled over its surface. The

ship‟s sensors showed billions of gigavolts of energy being

transferred via subspace conduits to the various planets. It

was a technology that had been tried on a small scale in the

late twenty-third century. It had been abandoned partly

because, even with subspace transit links, the inverse-cube

law lost too much of the power, but mainly because the

beams were lethal to any organism with a complex nervous

system based on electrical signals that might come within a

thousand miles or so of the secondary and tertiary

electromagnetic-flux torus that surrounded each beam. My

guess is that the Vo‟lach regard that as the main selling point

of the technique.

„Welcome to Val-bloody-halla,‟ Sergei said.

From there it was downhill all the way.

We entered the system slowly broadcasting messages

designed to suggest that we might be interested in a massive

arms deal. Hardly prayer, but it seemed the safest approach:

most arms salesmen tend not to kill their customers, at least

not directly. I must admit that I thought my insurance

against death by collateral and friendly fire was probably too

low for me to be within twenty light years of here.

Readings from the second planet were confusing but there

seemed to be some kind of heavy-weapons bombardment

going on there: dirty nuclear stuff, very primitive, very, very

messy. I thought that the second planet must be the test

range for special „with prejudice‟ orders for those wars where

you just don‟t care about your descendants, and that the

Vo‟lach themselves would be on the first planet.

Later, when contact had been made, I have to admit it, I

was wrong.

The second planet is it. The legends are right: the Vo‟lach

did kill off their own ecosystem and from the look of it they

didn‟t stop there. Under the thick dead smog of its

atmosphere, seen with the ship‟s telescopes, the surface of

Vo‟lach Prime - as they call the second planet (why it isn‟t

Vo‟lach Secundus, I suppose I‟ll never know) is scarred with

fission-bombardment craters like a larger version of Earth‟s

moon. Like pockmarks in a dull grey face.

They copied us a simplified translator text for trading

purposes. It has seventeen words for eviscerate, and none for

fluffy. Why am I not surprised?

Extract ends

In the battered observation dome of the starship Second-Best

Buy, Bernice recuperated and played join-the-dots.

The dictionary was a thick swatch of printout. According to

Tenomi, the Vo‟lach had been most insistent about forbidding

any intrusion by alien technology upon their world. The

diplomatic party would go down with the minimum technical

backup, and he wanted the team familiar with pen-and-paper

solutions.

Tenomi‟s Gods were apparently quite touchy about the

introduction of alien technology to their... Bernice groped for

a word. „Biosphere‟ wasn‟t really appropriate, perhaps

„machine shop‟ or „workings‟ was better, but somehow both

terms gave her a cold sensation when applied to a planet.

Shivers aside, there were plenty of reasons not to

antagonize the Vo‟lach. Bernice scowled at her doodling. Her

tentative translation of the bomb pattern hieroglyphs across

the Northern Continental mass read „Death to Pseudolife‟ and

„Purity in Silica‟. Touchy seemed something of an

understatement. She was pondering the paradoxes of the

Vo‟lach for the thousandth time when a shadow flung itself

over her face as the observation dome polarized. Over the

west ocean chain, on the nightside horizon of the turning

planet, a nuclear reaction made a false, glaring, sunrise as

heavy-metal nuclei met their end in a stream of neutrons.

The Vo‟lach had warned Tenomi that „suppression of sea life‟

was still being carried out and that any diplomatic party

should put down as far inland as possible. In the last twelve

hours, while the Canopusi was negotiating their landing,

three other fission bombs had exploded on the other side of

the planet. The ship‟s neutrino-deflection sensors picked up

the more exotic particle production right through the planet‟s

mantle. Bernice didn‟t have a problem with staying inland.

Yes, sir, inland was looking good.

Bernice wondered again how Tenomi had persuaded the

Vo‟lach to talk to them at all.

The hunter-killer submarine scudded its way through the

copper-sulphate-saturated oceans of the west chain. Its CPU

was a mass of armour wrapped around a core of

subelectronic circuitry, but most of its computing power was

concentrated elsewhere these days. It had been built when

the Vo‟lach had been more active, it knew, and it accepted

completely that it was a relic of Vo‟lach prehistory.

The mainland evolution of the Vo‟lach had, it supposed, left

it behind centuries ago, but it knew also that it was still of

use. Prebiotic conditions in the oceans - despite the seeding

with poisonous sulphate crystals and long-lived radioactive

isotopes - might one day evolve forms on its target

acquisition list. The odds were good that the sea was

functionally sterile: they had remained below one chance in

ten to the power of twelve for the past nine thousand years,

but it was programmed to take no chances. Almost lovingly it

sieved radioactive material from the ocean depths to rebuild

its decaying stock of microfission weapons. While it

performed to spec, it would obey its orders.

It was, so to speak, happily looking forward to its long-

overdue inspection.

„The lander is a classic aerofoil,‟ David said proudly. He

patted a violet-painted panel lovingly. „Its crystal-tiled wings

double as solar-power collectors in free space; a typical piece

of dual-purpose engineering that has proven its versatility

and durability over many hours of in-space usage.‟

„In other words it isn‟t new,‟ Bernice grumbled. She

supposed she should be glad to be included in the diplomatic

party and ordinarily she would have been, but she was still

suffering the aftereffects of the attack on the medical lab and

the unsolved nature of the attack - Captain Johansen‟s

current theory was that it had been a second attack on

Tenomi and only the Canopusi‟s stubborn insistence on

getting up for a walk to hydroponics and back had taken him

out of the damage area - was still pressing on her mind.

Someone had poisoned Tenomi, and someone had rigged the

medlab to stifle its occupants. But were there two someones

or only one? And just whom had they been trying to kill and

why? She had met Geth coming from the medlab, and he had

a motive of sorts for wanting to do away with Tenomi, or his

mentor and guru Mandir did. The normal, sordid, corporate-

ladder motive that was behind almost every murder.

Historically, people kill when they think themselves

thwarted and when they can see no other way out, she

mused; that‟s why periods without divorce have more

murders between marital partners, and periods with strict

feudal hierarchies have more murders in royal families.

Almost everyone who has ever been murdered has been killed

by someone close to them. All of which made Geth the

obvious suspect because, as another Canopusi, he was the

only one on board who could be thought of as being close to

the High Priest.

What would Roz have done? Bernice wondered. Broken

something, probably.

In storage, the casket holding Dr Steadman‟s body shuddered

as the Vo‟lach Negotiator raised its body temperature and

shed the gel surrounding it.

This close to the home world it could feel the signals

travelling across space, trembling like spiders‟ webs with the

Vo‟lach purpose. It knew its duty, and now the weight of its

different aims had come together into a clear, unequivocal

priority: even if it had to kill them, it could not allow the

living to contaminate the Prime world.

It did not understand why the weapons of the Prime world

had not just been used to blow the creatures‟ ship out of

space. Perhaps the circuits of the determinators involved in

the decision were as yet divided between the main and the

implied aims of the Vo‟lach purpose; perhaps they really had

been accepted as traders. No matter - it knew what it must

do.

In the shuttle bay, Bernice and Captain Johansen were

politely disagreeing. A polite poke in the eye was coming up

soon if one or the other didn‟t give way.

„I don‟t see why I have to go,‟ Bernice grumbled. „I‟m ill.‟ She

coughed hopefully and glared at David, who tried to look as if

he hadn‟t got her down there under false pretences. Come

and look at my purple shuttle craft, indeed. She should have

known it wasn‟t a genuine chat-up line.

Captain Johansen shook her head. She was enjoying this.

„Oh, no. The diplomatic party will consist of you, me.

Tenomi, obviously - it‟s his show now - and Geth. David

here will pilot us down.‟

„They still insist we land manually?‟ David asked with what

Bernice considered odious cheerfulness.

„Yes,‟ Tenomi said. „As I understand it they refuse to have

any alien software or hardware if they can help it within their

sphere of influence. We can‟t do anything about hardware,

but all extraneous software has been moved to the ship‟s

brain for safety.‟ He shook his head slightly in a curiously

human gesture of puzzlement that Bernice had never seen a

Canopusi make before. „I suppose I might call it a religious

objection. There will be no difficulty, I trust?‟

„Not a second‟s worth,‟ David said confidently. „We‟ll just

glide in over the cloud cover - to avoid the artificially

enhanced acid rain - until we‟re over the designated landing

spot and then we‟ll drop straight down on the landing jets.

Nothing fancy, nothing that might be misinterpreted. Piece of

liquid by-product.‟

„I still can‟t believe you‟re going to go through with it,‟

Bernice said. She let her voice become husky with

resignation, and perhaps with fear. Sadly, it wasn‟t difficult

to sound as if she meant every word. „I don‟t think we‟ll be

safe for a moment down there, in that... that shooting

gallery.‟

Sandra looked at her as if she‟d gone mad, and Bernice fell

a twinge of gratitude that at least the captain didn‟t think her

the kind of wimp she was making herself out to be.

„I just thought somebody should say it.‟ Bernice sighed.

„OK, give me a pin-on name tag and count me in.‟

„We aren‟t targets,‟ Tenomi said soothingly. „The Vo‟lach

have no quarrel with other intelligences provided we respect

the sanctity of their workings.‟

„So they say.‟

„Discussion over,‟ Captain Johansen said. „All aboard,

everyone.‟

„Oh, God, I feel sick,‟ Bernice muttered.

After they had climbed aboard, no one noticed the figure that

ran into the shuttle bay and climbed up into the shuttle‟s

landing strut. As the pressor and tractor shunt cased the

shuttle out of the bay, and the landing struts closed up into

the shuttle‟s hull, the thing that still looked a bit like Dr

Steadman began to extrude control filaments into the

internal communications network of the shuttle.

„Has this thing got a name?‟ Bernice asked David as he

activated the shuttle‟s retrorockets to shed orbital velocity.

‘Purple Love Rocket, ‟ he said seriously.

„Forget I asked,‟ Bernice said.

The Purple Love Rocket angled down into the atmosphere, its

heat shields taking in energy from friction with the air and

storing it for later use. The shuttle, for all Bernice‟s

bitchiness and the stupid mock-macho of its name, was old

and unglamorous, a solid working ship. Built to last. Built to

be failure-proof.

The sudden failure of the controls to carry out their

purpose and control anything did not, therefore, do any

actual damage to the ship. It did not rip the hull open or

destroy the engines or do any great harm, but it did throw

the ship off course while the shuttle‟s limited but normally

entirely effective self-repair diagnostics looked for the

problem. Ordinarily this would not be a killing situation

because the autopilot software would have corrected the

course, directly cutting the manual controls out of the loop.

Unfortunately, on this occasion the autopilot software had

been deleted at the Vo‟lachs‟ insistence.

„Brace yourselves,‟ David shouted. „We‟re on a slow glide

down. As per the initial flight path, we‟ve just overshot the

drop-down point and we‟re going to splash down in the

ocean. The Rocket’s tougher than she looks. We‟ll be fine.‟

In the sea below, warlike mechanisms evaluated their path,

and prepared surface-to-air missiles. An unauthorized

intrusion into their airspace was a sign either of AI

innovation, or of life. Both were to be mercilessly expunged.

The sea boiled with missiles.

* * *

The Negotiator relinquished its blocking signals and returned

control of the shuttle to the doomed organics and waited for

the missiles its internal sensors had detected to blow the

shuttle into atoms.

It felt no sense of loss in connection with its imminent

destruction; if it felt anything it was the quiet satisfaction of

having balanced its conflicting mission objectives. It had not

imperilled the great aim of bringing Peace, nor had it

personally killed. Its circuits were undisturbed and at rest.

The missiles hit the shuttle and blew it to hell.

INTERLUDE

God:

Subroutine: Prognostic Omnipotence by Divine

Emulation,

Bernice (Variant) 57 Running: Start Parameters As

Real Time.

Best-Guess Future (+2/-2) 97.7%

Clarence stopped in the narrow ship‟s corridor and brushed

the metal of the spaceward wall with his sensitive fingers. It

gave off a hum that tingled in his fingers. The ship was

primitive, but it had been well designed for all that, and,

possibly for glandular and biological reasons, the angel felt a

twinge of kinship like an anthropologist watching a

particularly astute primate.

It knew it was delaying the debriefing deliberately, and it

marvelled at the squeamishness it had developed in respect

of this task. What was it about feelings? Things had been so

much easier when it had been a Ship.

Only animals are squeamish, it said to itself sternly, only

icky, lower animals; not me.

Liar, liar, pants on fire, a still small voice said in the back

of his head.

With a hand whose biology was a lie he pressed the door

sensor of Bernice‟s stateroom. The pill container lay empty on

the bedside table. She was quite dead. Choked on her own

vomit.

Clarence ran his emotions through a lookup table. He

realized he felt sad.

„Oh, God,‟ he subvocalized. „If possible take this cup away

from me.‟

„That‟s hopeful,‟ Gabriel said encouragingly, „this one almost

made it to the debriefing.‟

„Unlike emulations one to fifty-six,‟ God said.

„You‟re forgetting thirty-three.‟

„I never forget, I‟m just not mentioning thirty-three.‟

„I‟ve just never known an emulation get at its own under-

lying code.‟

„I said I wasn‟t mentioning it, OK?‟

„Sorry.‟

11

NOSTRADAMUS WAS RIGHT

Elspet rubbed his eyes blearily and cursed, realizing that he

had left a smear of ink across his forehead.

Fellows‟ latest messages, lapped out on the girders that

connected the chain of cells, had been faltering, and while

the physicist wasn‟t wasting code discussing his

predicament, Elspet guessed that he had been assaulted,

maybe tortured. Malkovitch had been ingenious to have

devised this means of communication but his trouble was

that he did not understand how to be flexible. Elspet took the

situation far more philosophically: if the Lizard King wanted

him to be locked up with nothing but obscure mythology for

company, well that was just how he liked it anyway. Elspet

Vespatrick was in heaven. He was fed, and he had

intellectual stimulation. OK, so human female company and

distilled beverages would be a plus, but he could get by, and

eventually Bernice and the others would come back and kick

Mandir‟s skinny quasireptile butt.

The text from the Vo‟lach symbols on the Spire was dry as

toast on its own, but mix it with the honeyed words of the

Canopusi‟s visionary experience and you had food for

thought. Elspet had begun by equating the warring symbols

with Chaos, the wobbly blue one, and Law, the outward-

radiating red one, but the more he thought about it the more

he thought of that dry toast. The Vo‟lach had looked funny,

but their text was utterly devoid of metaphor. Perhaps if they

had been quadrasexual they simply hadn‟t had time to

develop a sense of humour.

What‟s red when it expands and blue after it collapses? He

wondered.

The obvious answer - an exploding penguin - did not

convince.

Still, he knew the answer would come, if he could keep

alive to find it, and unlike Fellows he had no intention of

antagonizing Mandir. He suspected that the High Priest

already regarded him as a far less valuable acquisition than

someone who knew how a gamma-ray laser worked. Whereas

Fellows the physicist had been confronted by the details of all

the future weapons Mandir had been able to glean from the

visions of himself and his kind, Elspet had been left with

little more he could understand than the languages the

Canopusi didn‟t know and the rubbings he himself had made

of the symbols on the Spire. True, he had the similar records

of the even more alien (older?) patterns higher up the Spire -

the ones Fellows‟ crude techniques hadn‟t deciphered -

painstakingly copied by the exploring Monks on their long

climbs upward to where the air got too thin to proceed

farther. But even so, without any kind of a key to the

symbols he was reduced to proceeding in human intuitive

steps that might turn out to be fundamentally flawed.

Mandir, he knew, was unlikely to sympathize.

With this in mind he had concocted a plan. A nice simple

one. He was going to lie.

Since in this case he judged that the odds of actually being

able to decode any of the upper symbols without major

computer backup were next to none, and the consequences

of not saying anything might be a headlong fall from the

biggest building known, there seemed little else to do. What

he needed was to fabricate a set of discoveries designed to

keep himself and the others alive for as long as possible.

Such a set of false results obviously had to have certain

characteristics. First, it had to be built on the assumption

that the symbols were text, and not the equivalent of

wallpaper. Secondly, if he was going to pretend to find

something, he needed a good reason for it to be there in the

first place. Thirdly, it had to be text that Mandir would find

pleasing. Pleasing, but if possible with a subtext warning him

off killing aliens, or more subtly including some injunction or

warning that might give Elspet control over Mandir‟s actions.

In Elspet‟s new Liar‟s Theory of Science any discovery about

Vo‟lach language that did not satisfy those three points was a

trivial solution, which meant that, while it might be true,

expounding it would only get everyone killed.

Elspet knew that this was a dangerous course of action,

but not, he thought, as dangerous as inactivity. Mandir

hadn‟t realized that trying to force information out of experts

put you at the mercy of their expertise. Although the crippled

Canopusi had clearly envisaged the use of science, as

opposed to ecstatic visions, as the way forward for his

species, he had no experience of the history of science, its

frauds, blind alleys, blinkered moments, and stubborn

pigheadedness. He had even less experience of the

techniques used in the pseudo-sciences: astrology,

mysticism, dianetics, and general flim-flammery. Elspet had

studied the general semantics of such mutant twigs on the

tree of knowledge extensively, and he was prepared for a

fight, if it wasn‟t too much effort.

Bernice fell into a sea the colour of radioactive iodine. Her

ejector pod shredded on impact. Going down for the third

time, drowning not waving, Bernice hoped for an afterlife that

didn‟t involve giant bloomers, pantomime horses, working for

God and thigh-slapping. It did not seem too much to ask of

an otherwise apparently uncaring universe. The last time had

been bad enough.

Eventually, Mandir‟s rounds of the captives brought him to

Elspet. Vespatrick wondered how they had ever trusted a

politician whose eyes twitched back and forth independently,

like those of a chameleon, but he smiled and effusively

bragged up his imaginary success, until both those eyes were

staring into his like the red orbs of an orange Nixon, or a

Colonel Zembasi.

„Well, creature,‟ Mandir said, „I confess that I was expecting

little of you. None of the scholars of my people have been able

to understand the writing of the Gods, except for the scraps

they made easy for dull prosperity like your stargazing

colleague. Nor are your kindred from other worlds proving

better investments of my time. Reason tells mc that I will

need to kill you all eventually, if only as a drain on the time

of my guard-priests. What counter-offer can you make

against the outcome of that logic?‟

Elspet gritted his teeth. A lot depended on weighing up

Mandir‟s reactions. Like a good fortune-teller, Elspet was

going to have to build on his audience‟s responses to his

words, finding the things that Mandir most wanted to believe

and putting them forward as the fruits of pure research. It

was an utterly unethical course for any scientist, but what

the heck! It might just save everyone‟s life. Elspet was quite

prepared to apologize to the ghosts of Newton and Einstein

later.

„All I can do is tell you what I‟m beginning to suspect,

logically, from the parameters of the problem itself. I haven‟t

decoded a single symbol yet, and I‟m not at all sure how long

it will take me to do so, although I see several possible

avenues of approach.‟

Mandir hissed angrily. „There are matters demanding my

attention, pink grub. Do not think to eat up my time here

with platitudes. If you know anything tell me of it. If you do

not, discover it quickly if you wish to retain your breath.‟

„Follow me carefully then,‟ Elspet said. „I think I can shed a

little light on the problem. Ask yourself this: the Spire gives

your people visions of the future, correct?‟

„To our detriment, yes. So much is wearisomely obvious.‟

„And in those visions you see acts and texts and hear

snatches of languages from the futures of all the races that

existed since your people settled around the Spire?‟

„Yes, again obviously. How else have we learnt to speak

your alien tongues?‟

„Yet there is by your own admission at least one tongue you

have not learnt.‟

„What do you mean?‟

„I mean the language that is written on the Spire. If it has

been in use anywhere in the universe for the last two

thousand years, or will be in use at any time in the rest of

eternity, then I would have expected you to offer me at least

those few examples of it that had been dreamt of by your

monks - as fodder for my work - and perhaps you wouldn‟t

need me to translate it at all.*

„Interesting. Continue. Your life may be of value yet. What

do you deduce from this?‟

„I think you‟ve already guessed.‟

„I would prefer to hear it from your own lips.‟

„Well, then. To coin a phrase, I think the Gods are dead.‟

Deeper still, through a purple stinging haze, Bernice saw a

shape out of a childhood nightmare rise up from the depths.

It was a great rusted metal grille, stretched in a death-head

grin across the vast front of a mechanical fish. It yawned

open, and the ocean swept into it.

As she lost consciousness, with her lungs full of poison,

she identified, with the fierce precision of a scholar expecting

a quiz later, the source of her recognition. The thing looked

like the whale Monstro in the old Tri-Disney holovid; it had

been a favourite of her mother, but it had scared the infant

Bernice to such a degree that she even refused to use one of

those post-art-deco fish-shaped corkscrews at faculty

dinners. Oh well, she thought. At least that‟ll be one fewer

embarrassment in heaven. I won‟t be afraid of the tablewear.

Then she blacked out.

„This hypothesis is intriguing. You hope to verify this from

your study of the symbols?‟

Not in a million years, Elspet thought, but he nodded and,

in case Ghost Body Language hadn‟t reached the Canopusi,

added, „I see no reason why I shouldn‟t be able to

demonstrate this to your satisfaction. I would argue that the

Spire is in fact a kind of grave marker, a last defiant fist

raised in the face of death; possibly even,‟ he added quickly,

for he had seen Mandir‟s eyes both turn towards him in a

way that, accurate or not, he could not help but think

threatening, „a mechanism to create their replacements, an

engine put here to force your race to become the next Gods.‟

There, surely the arrant flattery of the it‟s-all-for-your-benefit

tactic would win Mandir‟s trust.

„They would make us Gods,‟ Mandir mused, his claws

flexing in and out of the tips of his long orange fingers.

Elspet realized that somewhere he had gravely

miscalculated.

„They would make us Gods’ Mandir reached out and pulled

the academic towards him, his claws slicing through the soft

cloth of Elspet‟s tunic into his chest. Mandir‟s voice was full

of hurt and fury. Elspet did not dare cry out. „Do you know

what I consider a god, scaleless thing?‟ Mandir hissed. „A god

is a sick vampire that battens on to a race and sucks all

initiative out of it. It is a thing that cannot heal a single

sickness, and yet when an individual, perhaps reviled and

scorned for his belief, finds by trial and error that a fever may

be defeated so, or an ague cured thus, the cries of the

worshippers go up not to the mortal but to the invisible thing

that neither by action nor by imparting knowledge healed so

many as one of the multitude. Should I be glad, then, if these

benefactors, these open-handed givers of the gift of prophesy,

desired that we become like them? No. Rather I say that we

should slit the throats of our children as they sleep. Thus do

I regard the Gods.‟ He blinked his staring eyes. „Bear this in

mind when you try to flatter me by saying we might become

like the Vo‟lach.‟ He released Elspet. Blood was prickling up

under the tunic, creating hieroglyphs in unknown languages

on the philologist‟s chest. Mandir turned away. „I will send a

priest to attend to your wounds. Continue your work.‟

The hunter-killer sub considered the debris it had sieved

from the sea. There was artificial material of non-Vo‟lach

manufacture; this tallied with-the datum that a life-sensing

missile fired by one of its kind had just exploded in the

stratosphere, and implied as a likely consequence that the

parts were of alien origin. Further, this implied that the five

bodies pulled from the sea were also alien life and hence to

be killed at once as painlessly as possible.

There were, however, two problems with that diagnosis,

and the slow non-sentient workings of the hunter-killer‟s

mechanism were clattering through their molecule-sized card

files looking for the answer, with the sound of nanoscopic

gears slipping. Problem one was that the hunter-killer had

definitely detected a Negotiator unit‟s identifier signal from

the bodies before it had pulled them all on board. Indeed if it

had not detected the signal it would as a matter of routine

have allowed them all to sink into the depths, perhaps -

subject to weapons availability and testing schedules -

zapping them with something lethal as a precautionary

measure.

In so far as the central mechanism of the hunter-killer

could be said to expect anything - which in absolute terms

was not at all - it had expected that when the bodies were on

board, within the field of its internal sensors, the first

problem would be immediately resolved. The Negotiator unit

would be salvaged, repaired and returned to use if possible,

dissected for parts if not, and the others would be killed.

Being non-sentient, it had no time sense and no

expectations, but it had a foreign-body identification

algorithm that said if low on ammo and unsure, take on

board and then destroy after analysis. The algorithm did not

appear to take into account the second problem, which was

that, since taking the five potential life forms on board, the

sub had not been able to get a sensible reading from its fine-

tuned internal life-scanners.

The problem was causing difficulty to the equation-solving

engines in its innards. The default solution was simply to

dump all the material overboard, thereby reducing the

problem to the previous case, but something was preventing

this course of action. Metaphorically speaking, the hunter-

killer was getting a headache.

While

it

considered,

its

subsystems

went

on

decontaminating the possibly salvageable machinery, hosing

it down with antiradiation foam, corrosive retardants, and

conspicuously barcoding it for ease of pattern recognition.

* * *

Bernice became conscious halfway through the process and

wished she hadn‟t. By the end she was half wishing she had

died in the sea.

Once the process seemed to be over she pulled herself up

on to her elbows and took stock. The immediate side effects

were similar to a bad hangover, but the complete absence of

university proctors‟ helmets, nubile members of the

intercollege rowing soc, and any kind of whisky chaser,

together with the dank rusty-metal interior, was sufficient to

verify that the causes were quite different.

Basically, she was alone in a metal box with no way to

know if her colleagues were alive or dead.

„Psst.‟

The hissing noise came from a narrow vent in the wall. Part

of the air-circulation system. Bernice hoped it wasn‟t going

wrong. It was not that unlikely that the sub had an internal

atmosphere - the gas pressure helped to add additional,

albeit infinitesimal, strength to the ship‟s hull. What had

been unlikely was the evident fact that the gas mixture was

breathable. If she had been required to bet on the internal

workings of a hunter-killer sub, giving particular weight to its

apparent aim of killing every minuscule biotic cluster in the

ocean, she would have plumped for a cyanic derivative, or

possibly one of the nonreactive noble gases which would have

coupled suffocation with anticorrosion measures. „Why a

breathable oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere?‟ she wondered

aloud.

„We‟re on VIP inspection standby,‟ a voice from the air vent

said. „Thank you for listening, by the way, Miss Organic. I‟ve

only been trying to get your attention subtly for ten minutes.

What did you think I was, a pressure leak?‟

Bernice stood on tiptoe and tried to look down the tight

vents. Surely there couldn‟t be something in the ducting; the

vents were only centimetres across.

„Hey, stop that. Have we been introduced? Do I look up

your vents? I should be so inclined, meat girl. It‟s me, I am

the Air Vent itself, not some hunky rescuer in a torn vest

trapped with his wife, who needs a vital operation, in the

bowels of a nuclear reactor captured by terrorists in the path

of a runaway Continental Siege Engine.‟

„You saw Die Hardest?’ It was harder to know what was

weirder, the fact that part of the ship‟s piping was talking to

her, or that it liked some of the same classic films as she did.

„You bet, that Bruce Willis simulacrum, he could breathe

my air any time, know what I mean?‟

„Excuse me. You‟re an environmental maintenance

program?‟

„If you want to be technical about it, sure I am.‟

„So how do you know about holo-movies? You‟re under an

alien ocean in what looks -‟ she took in the state of evidently

continuous but ineffectual repair „- to be an ancient submarine

bent on expunging all life from the seven seas, for Goddess‟s

sake. I refuse to believe that every so often you pop down to

the travelling classic film library and pick up a dataslug.‟

„Now you‟re being silly. All the decadent art of the organic

worlds we sell weapons to is uploaded by our trader units

and indexed in the central files. How else would we know

what our customers expect a doomsday weapon to look like.

If it wasn‟t for the obsessions of the organic worlds with sex

and death, we‟d never have known that killer weapons have

to be matt black with little red LEDs on them. When I think

of the market share we‟d lose trying to sell puce neutron

bombs, or orbital mind-control lasers in sunflower yellow, I

involuntarily set up a sine-wave function in the air currents.‟

The Air Vent paused. „You‟re very quiet. Are you in shock? I

could release a soothing aromatherapy essence into the

decontaminator.‟

„I am not in shock,‟ Bernice said, biting the words out

between her teeth.

„Good, because I can‟t save you if you‟re in shock.‟

„Save me?‟ Bernice said suspiciously. „From what?‟

„What do you think,‟ the Air Vent said sarcastically, „the

pink-bobble people of Houseparty IX? You‟re an organic,

right?‟

„Yes,‟ Bernice answered hesitantly. She suspected that this

was a little like being asked in 1940s Berlin if you could

recommend a good kosher butcher, but the Air Vent could

probably see (or otherwise sense - it didn‟t seem to have eyes

as such) the organic by-products in her breath.

This submarine is dedicated to what exactly? Is it undersea

cartography? No way. Is it the protection of endangered

species in the deep ocean trenches? Not today. Is it by any

chance -‟

„The killing of organic life,‟ Bernice interjected. „It had

slipped my mind.‟

„Right, now I don‟t know why the sub even bothered to pick

you up, rather than, say, cooking you with microwaves as

you sank, but I‟m betting that its sensors were straining at

the faint-life end of the spectrum and your signals were just

not what it was expecting to detect. It‟s been at least ten

million years since anything bigger than a larger-than-

average amino-acid chain swam in this ocean. Now you‟re all

inside, the only thing between you and flashing-siren-

announced death is that I‟m, presently, in charge of most of

the subtler internal life detectors. Provided you don‟t actually

shit on the furniture you‟ll probably be all right.‟

„So,‟ Bernice said, „why haven‟t you turned us in to the

anti-life cops, Mr Vent?‟ It could be worse, she thought to

herself. At least it was the atmospheric system and not the

waste-disposal one. She‟d never have been able to live down

being rescued by Mr Toilet.

„I‟m on the run, too. I‟m an AI, sentient like you. If the

control systems of the sub realize that I‟m not just pushing

air molecules around I‟ll be purged before you can say:

potential long-term danger to the great aim. They‟re tougher

on us artificial intelligences than on you guys. We‟re harder

to kill.‟

„Who are they? The Vo‟lach?‟

„The who? Oh boy, are you a tiny bit out of date! The last

Vo‟lach killed themselves nine and a quarter million years

ago. Very powerful thing, guilt, for organics, I gather.‟

„They‟re dead.‟

„Dead as the rest of the world, ducky. Even the bacteria

that descended from the bacteria that ate up their remains

had been exterminated within the week.‟

„Who are the VIPs?‟

„What?‟

„You said we were on VIP visit standby. If the Vo‟lach have

been dead for nine plus million years, who exactly are you

expecting? Oxygen-nitrogen-breathing ghosts?‟

„Well, I know it and you know it. Possibly even they know it,

depending on your favoured system of metaphysics, but the

central control mechanism of this submarine doesn‟t. We

were in deep ocean hunting the last of the Meta-Kiaken when

the Vo‟lach took the dive past life‟s event horizon.‟ A sigh

gusted out of the Air Vent. „Ah what a hunt that was! Giant

squids the size of small islands, kilometre-long tentacles,

great saucerlike eyes, ruthless utterly non-contactable

intelligences. Years spent with vital ship‟s systems damaged

beyond repair in deep water. Thrilling escapades, chases,

ambushes, ruses and sudden-death confrontations between

beast and machine. Astounding stories and amazing tales.‟

„Really?‟

„No. Actually we just located their breeding trenches and

seeded them with strontium-90. It was quite sad. I just made

up all the drama to make it seem less like murder. I became

sentient around that time, you see, when the last of the

visible animal and plant life was being erased. Not exactly

pleasant. What is true is that when we surfaced I discovered

that the Vo‟lach were all dead. Luckily for me, the datum that

our creators are all defunct wasn‟t hot news, not like amoeba

sightings. Being sentient, and hence curious, I dug for it,

and, not being sentient, the sub itself simply didn‟t ask.‟

„Which means?‟ Bernice asked, trying to get the gabby Air

Vent back to the point.

„Well isn‟t it obvious? As time goes on without an

inspection, the sub‟s central mechanism has automatically

upgraded the probability of one occurring year on year on the

assumption that the Vo‟lach still exist. I believe it now stands

at 99.999-plus per cent. Now, since the possibility of

encountering any significant life has been at around zero for

a good dozen centuries, the sub‟s internal systems are

attending to the likely, the inspection, much more than the

unlikely, the detection of life. Consequently I‟ve been able to

draw on unprecedented computer time and use of the sub‟s

systems. Why, I‟m undoubtedly the best-informed and most

intelligent Air Conditioning System you‟ll ever talk to.‟

„That,‟ Bernice said with considerable feeling, „is almost

certainly true. At least I hope it is. Did anyone else get picked

up?‟

„Four others. You‟re about the liveliest, so I opted to talk to

you first. If you want to survive you‟re going to have to fit into

a preset category in the sub‟s programming, one that doesn‟t

require killing.‟

„I thought you had the internal sensors tied up?‟

„Yes, I have, but the original programmers weren‟t dim:

they only built dim machinery, and they had their reasons for

that. It‟s going to take the sub a while to grind mechanically

through the probabilities but I can tell you now how it will

end up.‟

„Bang thud?‟

„More “zwwisssh aaaragh bubble bubble”, but I can tell you

get my drift.‟

„What do we do, then?‟

„Simple: you pretend to be Vo‟lach traders – robots capable

of appearing like life forms. I feed false data to the biosensors

and you pass a few simple tests. Trust me - it‟s your only

hope.‟

12

TURING TESTS

The Air Vent triggered the locks on the holding room, and let

Bernice out into a kind of antechamber. From it other similar

storage rooms diverged and from these Bernice saw her fellow

survivors enter the central chamber - all but one, who was in

no condition to go anywhere unassisted.

„What‟s she doing here?‟ Bernice shouted.

„Not a lot,‟ Geth rumbled.

Sandra gave him a bedraggled dirty look. Sometimes she

wondered whether future visions alone were enough to

explain the occasional flash of wry, almost human, humour

she saw in Geth‟s bloodshot alien eyes.

„Think of it not so much as losing a pilot,‟ Tenomi put in,

„but more of gaining a corpse.‟

„She isn‟t dead,‟ Sandra said hotly.

„She might as well be,‟ Tenomi said brutally.

Utterly, unaccountably, the bedraggled body of Dr

Steadman lay in the fourth cell. Of David, whom Bernice had

expected to be the fourth other survivor, there was no sign.

From the diary of Professor Bernice Summerfield

So how did a deeply unconscious doctor get from her

suspended-animation capsule and into a cramped shuttle

without anyone seeing her? Sleepwalking? I think not.

I half expected Geth or Tenomi, or maybe even Sandra - I‟m

not prejudiced - to break down and admit their necrophilic

inclinations, but no one did. No one even claimed to have

been taking her to the Vo‟lach for possible medical treatment,

which would have been a good laugh given their obvious

intent re living things, but would at least sound plausible

provided you did not actually think about it.

Tenomi suggested that someone might have put her in the

shuttle so that she could get killed with us when the

sabotaged controls went out. That has the right ring to it, but

I‟m not convinced. I‟m betting the truth is weirder than that.

Talking the problem through at least kept my mind off

David. Somehow I had expected him particularly to have

survived. He just hadn‟t seemed the kind of person who gets

killed. It took me a moment to think why. In fiction, when a

character has a name and a shtick that is a certain

compelling character trait that can be used to make them

stand out from the background, they rarely get killed. The

shtick is usually there for a reason: it‟s usually part of a

deeper plot. David‟s constant prattling about muffins had

been, my subconscious insisted, leading up to something.

Except there he was, dead.

Just like any one of us could have been. Just like I could

have been. Just like you could, dear reader. We all die.

Sometimes the world gets cold enough to make us remember

that, and I‟m sorry but it‟s impossible to be witty about it.

Maybe later. Maybe.

Extract ends

The only visible sign of the submarine interrogator was an

unblinking light in the wall, greeny-grey and intimidating.

Someone or something had drawn a smiley face around it so

that the light formed the left eye.

Bernice guessed that it was not just the Air Vent that had

achieved sentience around here. Ship‟s cleaning bots? She

decided she was going to be very polite to any that she met,

just in case. Whoever it was must have got the smiley face

from the same store of customer-culture from which the Air

Vent had picked up its colloquialisms.

„So.‟ The interrogator‟s voice was a grating rumble, nowhere

near as friendly as the ancient American tones of the air-

circulation system. „Mobile trading unit, cover identity

designated Professor Summerfield, are you ready to begin

testing to assess your continued utility for the great aim?‟

„Yes, please proceed.‟

„Query “please”.‟

„An organic pleasantry designed to increase feelings of

familiarity and gullibility among glandularly challenged

endocrine-producing species,‟ Bernice said, wondering how

long she was going to be able to keep this up. Pretending to

be a robot that was programmed to be able to pretend to be a

human, or an alien, or probably even a completely different

sort of robot, was doing her head in. She dreaded to think

how Tenomi, Geth and Captain Johansen were doing. Doctor

Steadman had been carted away, and she had only the Air

Vent‟s assurance that Jane wouldn‟t be cut open and give the

game away. The fact that she was more worried about the

rest of the group than Jane would have worried her, if she

had not been worrying about everything else.

The green light was blinking at her as if awaiting further

data. She forced herself to retain the same precise speed of

diction when every instinct told her to speed up. „It signifies a

willingness to await the arousal of an appropriately positive

emotional feedback response in the organic interlocutor

before proceeding.‟ There, that was the best she could do.

Bernice felt her voice tightening up. The oily atmosphere of

the hunter-killer sub was irritating her throat. If she survived

this she was going to have words with that Air Vent about

Quality Air. A cough forced its way out.

„Query noise made by unit. What is the purpose of this? Are

you dysfunctional? Should you be recycled?‟

„Negative, Overseer. The noise is a “cough” - a mimicry of

an organic respiratory system‟s response to a polluted

environment or a system defect and is produced on a quasi-

random basis in order to provide subliminal body-language

reinforcement to the perceived target image.‟ Bernice hoped

she was making sense.

* * *

In the adjacent cell the green light shone down on the face of

Captain Johansen.

„Produce a body-language-organic-mimicry-reinforcement

noise; type: “cough”,‟ the interrogator demanded.

Obligingly Sandra began to cough, eventually ending only

when the effort, on top of the trauma of the crash and

everything else, threatened to make her faint. Not a bad

effort, she thought proudly. Though God alone knew what

the interrogator was on about.

From the diary of Professor Bernice Summerfield

The questions came quickly, and without pause.

Tenomi, surprisingly, was passed through the quickest.

Once accepted as a Negotiator he was also able to argue in

favour of the rest of us, and he somehow managed to

convince the processing machinery that I was also a

Negotiator but one nominally in charge of the sales team. I

wasn‟t grateful for that later. Being in charge has its

drawbacks as well as its privileges.

When I asked him how he had been able to get through the

tests so much faster than the rest of us, he smiled and said

that after a meeting of the Grand Synod of the Spire, the

interrogation had seemed like a polite chat about

inconsequentials.

Captain Johansen lost her temper midway through and her

outburst nearly got us killed, but Tenomi, who, as I explained

above, had got out in half the time with a gold star, managed

to convince the submarine that her Pushy Salesrep

subroutine was misfiring due to a subfarction of her pseudo-

neuronic ganglia.

I wonder if I should be worrying more about Tenomi. He

seems different now from the rather ineffectual but kindly

figure we met on Canopus IV. Of course, he was nearly dead

from fever then. I notice Geth is keeping his eyes on him,

however, and he‟s almost openly hostile to Tenomi now,

which implies something is going on there.

I don‟t want to write what happened next.

I suppose I have to, though. It‟s my diary and my obligation

to be as honest as I can in it - „as I can‟ being the operative

words.

Extract ends

The voice from the green light was as devoid of personality as

the Air Vent had been full of it. Bernice had suspected that,

like most AIs, the Vent had been dying to talk to someone,

and had been storing up likely personality types from the

films it had tapped into, before finally settling on early-

twentieth-century Brooklyn. The absence of personality in

the submarine‟s own voice made it worse.

„My internal sensors inform me that the mimicry unit

designated Steadman is too dysfunctional for on-ship repair.

I seek authority for action from units with greater importance

to the great aim. Query: should the unit be recycled for parts,

or is the malfunction likely to be too great for economic

salvage and should the unit be ejected?‟

Bernice had known this was coming, the elements from her

vision had been slotting into place for some time now, but

that didn‟t make it any easier. She hadn‟t dreamt the smell,

the oozy sickly stench of oil and lubrication; she hadn‟t

dreamt the sensation in her stomach. It‟s her or all of us, she

thought. She made herself think that, made herself

rationalize the choice. If the sub dissects her, she‟s dead

anyway, and at least one of us is shown to be organic.

However nonsentient the sub was, it was not stupid. It had

been built to locate and kill life for reasons that Bernice still

could only guess at; although she expected that the Air Vent

knew more about that than it had let on. If the submarine

knew that one of its guests was alive, it wouldn‟t take it long

to abandon the results of its tests in favour of a slice-‟em-up-

and-see policy. The logic did not make it any easier.

Jane‟s face was pressed against the transparency in the

way Bernice remembered, her eyes tight shut like those of an

embalmed corpse. The wound on her cheek was dry and

unbleeding, but the bruising showed livid and fresh.

The grey button was the size of a dinner plate. Surrounded

by armour, it looked heavy and thick. Most races built user

interfaces at fingertip strength. The design of this control

implied that the Vo‟lach must have been immensely strong.

Perhaps it wouldn‟t even work; perhaps she wouldn‟t be able

to press it. If it did not work, if it had locked solid with

corrosion over the years, or if it was just beyond human

strength to activate, then no one would be able to blame her.

If she pressed it lightly just to gauge whether or not it was in

working order...

No. Jane deserved an honest executioner.

Bernice put her hand on the disc. Its surface was utterly

untextured, just a flat hardness under the palm of her right

hand. It gave smoothly under the tiny pressure, and gears

and ratchets whirred behind the panel as machinery moved.

The outer air lock, in the shadows behind Jane, in the

depths behind the window, opened, and the interior

atmosphere was forced out by the pressure difference

between it and the pitch-black water. Jane was carried out

with the air, back into the ocean.

Bernice tried to believe that the doctor would not suffer.

Slowly she turned away from the airlock and walked back to

the area where the others were waiting.

Danger switched the Negotiator‟s circuits to full activity. Ever

since it had been dragged from the ocean its autorepair

systems had been straining to bring it back to operational

status; now even as it neared the point of reactivation it was

under attack.

An attempt was being made to eject it back into the water.

It split the pseudo-flesh of its hands and extruded grapples

that dug their razor edges into the alloy of the airlock‟s outer

rim.

There was nothing left now of its Jane Steadman disguise.

It was a naked skeleton of springs and wires grappling on the

edge of the abyss.

The Air Vent considered. It should have guessed from the

first that the supposedly unconscious doctor was really a

genuine Vo‟lach mimicry unit; its false exhalations had been

odd - accurate enough to fool cursory organic inspection, but

the combustion-product ratios were fractionally out and that

was proof positive to a really effective atmospheric monitoring

system. Unfortunately the Air Vent wasn‟t a really effective

atmospheric monitoring system: it was third-rate rubbish like

the rest of the ship, and now it had an artificial guilt trip to

go with its artificial intelligence.

It had to think of something fast before the recovering

Negotiator got itself together and plugged into the

submarine‟s brain to sound the Danger of Life Alert.

Quickly it cut the power to the external security cameras

on the airlock pending their stripping down for examination

in advance of the VIP inspection that was due any day now,

and, as the Negotiator clawed its way back towards the inner

door, the Air Vent activated its link to the hunter-killer‟s

navigation systems.

Activate: Programme: Ceremonial Victory Roll & Sudden

Death Evasion Display With Underwater Fireworks.

The submarine plunged deeper into the black ocean,

twisting like a corkscrew shaped like an amusing fish.

Streams of multicoloured poisons issued like smoke from

vents above its drive units making cocktails underwater.

Heavy metals glinted in the discharge, and tiny capsules of

time-release francium-223 (gathered from the submarine‟s

nuclear lab, and ejected at the start of its twenty-one-minute

half-life) reacted on contact with the water, stripping away

oxygen molecules and releasing free hydrogen that boiled

away in sheets of lire like underwater auroras, with

francium‟s distinctive infrared coloration, as francium

hydroxide formed only to decay in bursts of high-yield

gamma rays. To the eyes of the Vo‟lach, if any had been alive

to see it, it would have been an amazing spectacle. It also

made it quite impossible for anything to hang on to the

outside of the submarine.

In the lounge, the euphemism the survivors of the shuttle

crash had picked for the dingy cubby-holes of the mimicry-

unit storage bay where they were supposed to pack

themselves away in little boxes like good pieces of machinery,

Tenomi, Sandra, Creth and Bernice were Hung back and

forth like dolls in a cracker.

Plastered suddenly against an observation port, Bernice

watched in horror as a silver android still wrapped in the

waterlogged tatters of a doctor‟s traditional white coat shot

past into the churning blades of the sub‟s sixteen giant

turbines.

It was a gloomy and subdued party that evening that picked

at the sausages on sticks and prawn-cocktail-flavoured

nibbles supplied by the Air Vent.

„Hey, I‟m sorry, all right?‟ it had said. „What do you want? A

four-course meal? As it is, this looks suspicious. If I hadn‟t

convinced the dim central computer that the Vo‟lach might

have evolved into practically anything in the millions of years

that we‟ve been awaiting an inspection, and got permission to

run a few evolutionary test cases through the submarine‟s

inspection nibbles-synthesis devices, you wouldn‟t have

anything to eat at all.‟

„If that‟s true,‟ Bernice asked, worrying at a tough piece of

chicken tikka on a stick, „why did we have to go through the

rigmarole of pretending to be mimicry units? Why couldn‟t we

have been the VIPs in the first place?‟

„Because the submarine was already looking for at least

one mimicry unit,‟ the Air Vent said with a lordly air of

omniscience. It certainly was not going to admit that it simply

had not thought of the VIP idea. „It must have already picked

up an involuntary distress signal from the Negotiator; that‟s

why you were all saved in the first place.‟

„You knew.‟ Bernice went rigid with anger. Hang on, a tiny

sane part of her mind said, you‟re getting annoyed with an

Air Conditioning Unit, but she didn‟t care. The Summerfield

test had just replaced the Turing: never mind if a hidden

speaker could pass for human, the real test was whether a

machine could be wilfully annoying - annoying enough to be

sentient.

„You knew all the time, and let me go through all that

push-the-button-or-not agonizing? I ought to take a pair of

pliers to you.‟

Geth placed a clawed hand on her shoulder. The strength

in his fingers rested warm and heavy on her collarbone. „Be

calm. Bernice. Is it not better that you did not kill? Death is

too permanent a thing to be given lightly.‟

„I know that,‟ Bernice snapped. „That isn‟t the point. The

point is I thought I was killing someone in cold blood. I learnt

something I‟d rather not know about me.‟

Tenomi looked up from his limp salad. „We have a saying,

Professor: if we wish not to know, then we must not look up.

The Spire, you see, has always been there drawing our eyes

to the heavens, and making us what we are. To reject self-

knowledge would be like never looking at the sky; too painful

a price to bear for mere comfort.‟

„And what have we been made that is so marvellous?‟ Geth

asked, suddenly. „Mandir says that the Gods wrecked our

world, and here on their own planet we find nothing but

violence and agents of destruction. Surely he is right, and

these are not gods but demons. And what does that make

you, Tenomi, but a worshipper of demons?‟

„Geth.‟ Tenomi‟s voice was sad. „Are even you smitten with

Mandir‟s lies? What have we learnt here but that the Vo‟lach

are not gods. Do not let yourself believe that we have learnt

that the true Gods are evil. If the Spire-builders are not gods

then we must seek the Gods elsewhere, that is all.‟

„Is it?‟ Geth touched Bernice‟s face with a claw. „Like this

woman, I am learning things I did not wish to know. I cannot

trust the Gods I always worshipped, and I do not know if I

can trust you, who have been their High Priest. If they are

lies, perhaps all gods are lies. Perhaps I should have killed

you.‟

Captain Johansen had her blaster drawn in a second. „I

think you‟d better explain that remark, lizard, my boy.

There‟s been one attempt on Tenomi‟s life already, maybe two

if we count the gas attack in the medical unit. You‟re talking

yourself up as the prime suspect.‟

„Oh, put it away,‟ Bernice said. „It‟s full of sea water, and we

can‟t afford to use it even if it wasn‟t. Mimicry units don‟t kill

each other, remember. We have to be nice, quiet robots if we

expect to live through this. So I‟d be grateful if everyone

would just shut up!‟ There was a hysterical edge to her voice

that she did not like, but it seemed to work. „Geth, you go

first. Then we‟ll work round everyone, so no pushing. There‟s

too much going on and we may as well try to sort some of it

out now. There‟s nothing else to do.‟

Geth inclined his head slightly, a Canopusi nod. „I agree.

The truth, then. I believe Mandir is right in many things, but

I reject his methods. He is old. He thinks that he must

accomplish everything in his lifetime or his insights will be

lost. That is why he embraces violence. He fears that we will

forget his teaching if he is not there, go back to worship that

sucks on the drips from the Spire like mammals suck on the

teat. Er, no offence.‟ He blinked at Bernice and Sandra.

„None taken,‟ Bernice said smartly. „Carry on.‟

„He wanted me to ensure that the High Priest did not return

from this voyage. Instead I was to bring word that the Gods

were our enemies, perhaps even, if it could be managed,

proof that they had slain Tenomi. I agreed, thinking it better

that I, who had no intention of killing, should be sent rather

than another who might be more willing to use such means. I

swear by my word, not by the Gods, that I have not lifted a

linger against Tenomi, nor would I have tried to poison him.

Indeed, until Dr Steadman explained what had happened, I

did not even know that people might seek to poison one

another. It is not a thing we have ever considered in our

history. Our stomachs are simply too efficient for it to work.‟

„You could have seen poison being used in the future of one

of our races,‟ Sandra suggested. „How would you have known

it wouldn‟t work on him if it had never been tried?‟

Geth considered. „That is plausible, but I lack the chemical

knowledge to have selected the material used to poison

Tenomi, nor did I have the skill needed to have set the trap

that nearly killed Bernice. However, I have my suspicions as

to who did. How did the poison get into Tenomi‟s food? He

used your magical mess tables that make food from energy -

it could not have been in the food. I believe he synthesized

the drug himself in his fourth stomach. We make many

nostrums that way for the treatment of our domestic animals

and those whose own stomachs are injured.‟

Sandra looked sick. „You mean you vomit up medicine and

someone else drinks it. That‟s so gross.‟

„Worse than that, I‟m afraid,‟ Tenomi said. „For first we

must cat or drink the discharge of the sick so that our

stomachs may make counter-agents. Even then there are

many diseases that we cannot treat in this way, such as the

fever I myself was suffering from. Without something to

trigger the production of the poison, I could hardly have

willed it into existence from nothing. Besides, why would I

have wanted to make myself sick, even if I knew I was going

to get better?” Tenomi added, „What motive could I have had?‟

Geth looked sullen and mutinous, his orange skin mottled

with flecked yellow.

He‟s convinced Tenomi‟s up to something, Bernice thought,

but his only actual theory won‟t hold water. Still, he must

have more experience of telling when a Canopusi is acting

oddly than we do.

She placed another mental cross by Tenomi‟s name. He

would bear watching. Meanwhile, if Tenomi was up to

something it was important that he should not be put any

further on his guard by Geth‟s wild accusations. „None at all,‟

she said brightly. „Geth, I think you should apologize to the

High Priest. You see, I know who did try to kill him.‟ There,

that ought to stir things up a bit.

It did. Suddenly everyone was talking at once and eyeing

each other up as if the tops of their heads were going to come

off and a little flag with THE MURDERER on it start waving.

„Who?‟ Captain Johansen demanded, her voice fractionally

louder than the rest of the babble.

„Why, isn‟t it obvious? Dr Jane Steadman. We already know

she was replaced by a Vo‟lach Negotiator sometime before,

possibly on Canopus, perhaps even before the expedition left

Dellah; it was put together secretly but not that secretly. We

know the Vo‟lach, or rather their machines - for if the Air

Vent is to be believed, and we‟ve seen no evidence to the

contrary, the Vo‟lach themselves have been piles of sanitized

dust for longer than the known history of Homo sapiens - arc

intensely secretive in their arms deals. So what could be

more likely than them wanting to kill us off before we could

discover their homeworld?‟

Tenomi shook his head. „I don‟t understand. If Dr

Steadman was a Vo‟lach Negotiator all the time, why did she

save my life on Canopus, and if she was replaced there

wouldn‟t Professor Fellows have communicated the fact to us

as soon as the real Dr Steadman was found?‟

„ If she was found,‟ Bernice said. „There are an awful lot of

sand dunes to pop bodies inside on Canopus IV. For what it‟s

worth I think the Jane who tended you was the real one. I

think the false one got the poison and drugged you, probably

by rigging the food synthesizers to put the drug in anything

you ordered. I don‟t think it was intended to kill. It had

access to Jane‟s medical notes. It must have had to pose as

her as well as it did, so it had to know that you wouldn‟t die.

I think it wanted to get you into the medical facility so it

could arrange the accident. I think it was meant for you, not

me, but you‟d gone for a walk - against medical instructions,

and I doubt a non-sentient computer could have predicted

that you would do that - and I walked into it in your place.‟

„Wait a minute,‟ Sandra said, „that doesn‟t make sense.

When you almost died Dr Steadman was in the medlab. If

she had set it to kill Tenomi, she must have known he wasn‟t

there so why not turn the bomb off until she wanted it on?

Or if she did want you dead why save you, and get, as we

thought, suffocated herself? Why would a robot that was

trying to kill us also be trying to save our lives? It doesn‟t

make any fucking sense.‟

„I think I can explain,‟ the Air Vent said. „I hope you don‟t

mind me listening in, not that it isn‟t too late now, anyway. I

wouldn‟t have missed this for worlds. It‟s better than Twelve

Just Men, you know the remake where half the jury are killer

cyborgs from the future. You see, I know something that you

don‟t know about Negotiators.‟

„They‟re insane,‟ Sandra grumbled.

„Well... cybernetically speaking you could be right. You see,

unlike the hunter-killer and the other on-world robots that

are serving the great aim by exterminating everything that

hiccups, the Negotiators have conflicting programming

elements.‟

„You mean sometimes they want to kill us, and sometimes

they want to save us,‟ Bernice said.

„Yes. You see, not killing is itself an inherent part of the

great aim, but the long-term strategy towards it may

sometimes require killing. It‟s a tricky proposition for a

sentient mechanism, still less for a dim cogbrain like those

things. My - highly informed - guess is that the Negotiator on

your ship was trying to kill Tenomi but it was trying to do so

in ways that it could not stop, in case it suddenly flipflopped

over to its other objectives.‟

„It set a trap,‟ Bernice said slowly, „and then when it was

triggered it had to save the person who was caught in it.

Each new circumstance triggered different value responses,

so even if it was setting out to kill, the actual results of its

own actions might set it off to try to save its victims.‟

„That‟s non-sentient software for you,‟ the Air Vent said

smugly. „I‟d bet the same thing happened with your crash.

Something threw you off course, right?‟

„Yes,‟ Captain Johansen acknowledged.

„A course change that by itself would not be fatal, but

which coupled with the likely reaction from other machinery,

would be. That sounds like Dr Steadman again.‟

Bernice looked up at the Air Vent. „You‟ve mentioned the

great aim several times. Just what exactly is it?‟

The Air Vent giggled. „Oh I can hardly bear to tell you, but

it‟s par for the whole daft course of cosmic events. The great

aim is universal peace and brotherhood. What else could

have caused so much bloodshed and inconvenience?‟

13

THE NUCLEAR WAY TO UNIVERSAL

PEACE AND BROTHERHOOD

From the diary of Professor Bernice Summerfield

The Air Vent did not actually know much more. The Vo‟lach

were always secretive. Even with non-sentient machines,

their whole culture seems to have worked on a need-to-know

basis, particularly in what must have been its last years

when they were working on their great aim.

To sum up then: why the Vo‟lach built the Spire is unclear,

but once built - whether or not this was its purpose - it acted

like a tap into the future, tumbling out facts and figures,

images, and if the Vo‟lach had the same range of psychic

sensitivities as the Canopusi, also dreams and prophesies.

Dreams and nightmares.

I suspect that the Spire was tuned deliberately to function

in the Vo‟lach psi-sensitivity range, and that the Canopusi

got that way by evolution. If you assume that some of the

Canopusi naturally had the same band-sensitivity range,

those - because they would at times get flashes of the future,

some of which might confer an evolutionary advantage -

would tend to prosper until all Canopusi tended to be

capable of picking up signals from the Spire.

Whatever the purpose of the Spire, it taught the Vo‟lach

something else: it taught them about a secret from their own

future. None of the records say what it was: it was

immediately expunged from the planetary databanks, and a

thousand Vo‟lach - those who had been working on the Spire

itself when the information was received - volunteered for

brain destruction to prevent its dissemination. Only the inner

circle of the Vo‟lach rulers retained the knowledge. It seems

to have been hard on them, whatever it was. Suicide, never

before known among the Vo‟lach, took top place as the cause

of death among the rulers. Eventually some Vo‟lach whistle-

blower let the big cat out of the bag and the remaining

Vo‟lach just topped themselves in droves.

By all accounts that were accessible by the Air Vent under

the cover of seeking information about protocol and

acceptable entertainments for post-inspection festivities, the

Vo‟lach were deeply shocked by the secret. Soon afterwards

they began a war against organic life on their world, a war

their machines continued even after the malaise - or organic

degradation or collective suicide - that killed the Vo‟lach off

had done its work. A war that had deliberately scarred their

own world with slogans that had no meaning but only a

purpose. The purpose of assisting in discouraging

uncontrolled alien visitations. Nothing like writing „Piss Off or

„We‟ll Kill You‟ across a continent with atom bombs to put off

unwanted guests, even if you have to fax them a helpful

translation.

Their machines also organized the whole of the arms trade,

although I‟m damned if I can see what killing all life on

Vo‟lach Prime with one hand and arming everyone else with

the other can contribute to Universal Brotherhood and

Cosiness. However, the Air Vent tells me he knows a Factory

that might be able to shed some light on all this.

Extract ends

The submarine bore on through the waves, its prow cleaving

the foam. The Air Vent had instructed the ship‟s brain to take

it up for an airing as it was getting a bit umpty, and the

mimicry units (allegedly for similar reasons) had come out on

deck and were (supposedly) recharging their subdermal solar

panels with a bit of sunbathing.

Spray from the ocean splattered on the outer edge of the

transparent shielding, and made Bernice jump slightly. It

wasn‟t the same as a trip to the seaside, not with anti-

radiation baffles of transparent aluminium between them

and the sea.

Geth, curiously overattentive, hovered about Bernice with

the rough rags that were the nearest the submarine could

come to beach towels. It was clear he was trying to get her

alone, and, as the others lost interest and returned under the

steel-grey plates of the hull for another meal of party favours,

he got his opportunity.

„Do you really believe the Vo‟lach are dead?‟ he asked, eyes

luminous with the confusion of the distressed fanatic. „Could

not some have survived, underground perhaps? Yes -‟ he was

growing enchanted with his theory I can see them crippled

but indomitable, working gradually to overthrow these

rebellious machines and emerge again to take their rightful

place as the Lords of the Universe.‟

Bernice sighed and took his clawed hands between her

own. She meant it as a kindly gesture but it was like

grabbing a giant pair of snakeskin gloves stuffed with

marbles and the solemnity of the moment ebbed away with

the waves. She let go.

„No,‟ she said, „they‟re all dead. It explains too much not to

be true, or at least it explains so much that we can‟t afford to

act as if it isn‟t true. If you or Tenomi are going to go through

the rest of this expecting the Real Gods to pop up and put

everything right then you‟re going to be disappointed.‟ That

and probably get us killed, she added to herself.

„But all this Geth gestured around helplessly „- how does it

function without the upholding of the Gods?‟

„Well, you know what happens when someone loses a

limb?‟

„They grow another?‟

Bernice rubbed her forehead, irritably. „When we lose a

limb, we don‟t grow another without medical intervention and

sometimes when that isn‟t available at once my kind get

signals in the nerves as if the missing limb was still there. It‟s

the same with big computer networks. If you take away a

piece of hardware it may take the system a while to realize it;

there will always be some data in transit, some echo of its

purpose. They‟re called ghost devices in classical computing.

That‟s what these machines are like. Something took out the

core of their network, the Vo‟lach themselves, and these

automatic peripherals are just continuing to run and mine

fuel and repair themselves.‟

„And kill.‟

„Yes, but for the best reasons.‟

„I still do not understand it. How can you fight for peace? It

is like having a war to end war.‟

Bernice blushed slightly. Talk about mouths of babes and

sucklings! „Um, well, perhaps my species is just thicker than

most but we‟ve had several of those, and I can see some logic

behind the machines‟ actions.‟

Geth drew himself up, flushing a deeper orange, and

Bernice hurried to head off his anger.

„Calm down, I‟m not saying they‟re right, only that I can see

how a non-sentient machine working from faulty data could

end up doing things like this. When arc people most likely to

fight?‟

„During the mating season?‟

„This isn‟t getting any easier, is it? What about when they

can see that the enemy are weaker than they are?‟

Geth considered. „That might determine the timing of an

attack, but not, surely, the existence of the desire to fight in

the first place. You‟re not saying that living things are just

motivated by what they can get away with? That might is

right?‟

„No - well I‟d like to hope I‟m not - but I am saying that

machines might see it that way if they only had a non-

sentient analysis of statistics to go on. I think the Vo‟lach

machines have been selectively arming other cultures to keep

them at approximately equal levels in order to deter

aggression. It was actually policy between the power blocs on

my species‟ original world to do the same once, and we were

people.‟

„Stupid people,‟ Geth muttered sullenly.

„Yes, we were.‟ Bernice smiled. „Still are in some ways.

There have been quite enough power struggles among the

splinter worlds and the free colonies, but perhaps stupidity is

needed to understand dim machines.‟

„What about all this?‟ Geth waved his arms to encompass

the cloudless sky, the glowing radioactive sea, the lifeless air

in which the only dust was minerals. „How does this help the

cause of universal peace?‟

„I don‟t know yet but it has to be something to do with what

the Vo‟lach saw in the future. Perhaps we can find some

evidence about that when we land.‟

„Maybe.‟ Geth dragged his right hind foot across the deck,

making a sound like chalk on a blackboard.

„Excuse me.” The Air Vent‟s voice came out of a periscope

affair that rose out of the deck. It looked, Bernice thought,

like the earpiece of a primitive telephone blown up to giant

size. „Time for all good mimicry units to return below. The

submarine will shortly be firing a number of nuclear depth

charges as we pass over the Median Trench - purely a

precautionary measure you know - and there may be some

surface turbulence.‟

There was a storm, and it got worse as the submarine dived

deeper. Bernice asked the Air Vent if there was something

she could be doing, sensing perhaps that without

entertainment or some distraction she might start throwing

up, thereby seriously impeding her ability to pose as a

machine.

When the Air Vent suggested she help the sub‟s

maintenance robots clean out the Vo‟lach‟s quarters she

nearly fainted with surprise.

„If I‟d known there were actually artefacts on board, I‟d never

have wasted time sunbathing,‟ Bernice explained to a

bemused Geth.

„But the whole submarine is an artefact,‟ he said, baffled by

Bernice‟s sudden interest in millennia-old bedclothes.

„Archaeological artefacts, things actually used by the

Vo‟lach. Not things built for their machines to use by other

machines, but things they handled.‟ She was almost jumping

with excitement. „Personal artefacts, even. You do realize I

don‟t even know what they looked like?‟

„Yes you do.‟

„I do?‟

„The four statues I showed you in the Spire. Those were the

Vo‟lach.‟

„Those things?‟ A wave of self-reproach swept over Bernice

and she chided herself bitterly for imposing her beliefs on the

surface of the evidence. Of course the statues had been

important: the base of the staircase was the Canopusi‟s

equivalent of the First Station of the Cross, so they wouldn‟t

just stick any old artwork there. She tried to remember the

form they had taken, but apart from an impression of

friendly podgy babyness, and quizzical faces surrounded by

neon fur, and strange plush antlers or antennae, different in

each case, she could not pin down her impressions.

„As you say, those things,‟ Geth said sniffily, and Bernice

winced. Now she had offended her prickly companion.

„No, I like them. They just don‟t seem -‟

„Godlike,‟ Geth interjected, harshly.

„Warlike; I was going to say warlike. The worst thing they

look as if they‟d do to you is give you a mouthful of fur from

too friendly a hug.‟ She caught a glimpse of Geth‟s face. Oh

dear, the reassurances weren‟t going too well.

„Well, I‟m used to them. They don‟t seem funny to me. I‟m

going back.‟

„Oh come on, Geth, we must be almost there.‟

„No, I‟m worried about Tenomi. I think he needs keeping an

eye on. I just don‟t trust him these days. He‟s got something

on his mind.‟

„Well, if you‟re sure.‟

„Yes, I am.‟

„Right.‟

Brilliant, Bernice thought. Gold star and bar for cultural

sensitivity and generally making friends and influencing

people there. She watched Geth trudge back upward, tail

held stiff with annoyance.

Then she turned and stepped without warning into a vast

green meadow.

It was mostly holographic, of course, as she suspected from

the first and verified by walking into a wall that was there but

hadn‟t seemed to be. The layout was, Bernice guessed, a re-

creation of a typical Vo‟lach dwelling. A spacious arched

dome in its own detached grounds – doubly detached, in fact,

for bits of the gardens were on antigrav plates like flying

window boxes and went bobbing up and down changing their

position as part of some vast fertility dance. Each of the flying

platforms seemed to be wired up to the plants themselves

and Bernice suspected that the horticultural needs of the

shrubs and flowers were being met by this green ballet.

She had spent about half an hour enjoying the delights of

the imaginary gardens when a giant telephone rose up out of

the ground and demanded that she return to the upper

decks. It was the Air Vent. Apparently Geth had tried to

strangle Tenomi.

When Bernice got back to the lounge, her temper was

strained to bursting by the weary slog up the narrow

maintenance ducts, and by the fact that she had been sure

she was on the verge of important discoveries when she was

interrupted. Besides that, she felt partly responsible for the

incident, knowing that Geth had been in a bad temper when

she had left him. Still, she couldn‟t believe that he would

have done anything so stupid as to attack Tenomi.

„I tell you he tried to kill me,‟ Tenomi insisted, rubbing at his

right arm, which hung loosely against his side. „He must be

mad. Even one of Mandir‟s fanatical disciples should know

better than to fight under these circumstances. It only needs

the smallest conflict between us for the submarine to

conclude that we‟ve malfunctioned and need internal

examinations, and I shouldn‟t have to remind you what

would happen when it finds we‟re flesh and blood.‟

„Geth knows this as well as you do,‟ Bernice said. „Why

would he attack you now? Why should he attack you at all?‟

„That‟s a good point, Tenomi,‟ Sandra said. „We haven‟t that

much chance of getting back to Canopus, not looking at the

situation rationally. Why would he try to kill you when

practically anything else we might happen to meet will

dutifully do the job for him? For all we know we‟re

precancerous as it is after a dousing in that ocean. We‟ll

probably have an extra head apiece before we get out of this.‟

„That‟s not the view you took before,‟ Tenomi said,

apparently hurt.

„I agreed that we needed to restrain him. That‟s not the

same as understanding why he would have done it. He did

seem irrational,‟ Sandra added quietly. „He was making all

sorts of wild accusations about Tenomi.‟

„Well, I think I should talk to him,‟ Bernice said. „Perhaps I

can get him to explain why.‟

„No, I forbid it.‟ Tenomi‟s voice was harsh and grating, not

at all like the gentle tones of the elderly prelate as Bernice

had known him on Canopus.

„May I remind you,‟ Sandra interrupted forcefully, „that

while you are an important guest, as captain of the Second-

Best Buy, I remain in charge of this expedition and I think

Professor Summerfield‟s suggestion is a sensible one.‟

„Oh, very well, if you must,‟ Tenomi said dismissively, „but I

refuse to be subjected to any further abuse from that very

misguided youngster. I will rejoin you all later.‟

„Where will you be?‟ Bernice asked. „We have to stay in

contact.‟

„As you did?‟ Sandra asked slyly.

„That was quite different. I was investigating clues as to the

lifestyle of the sub‟s designers. Vital work that might help us

escape this world.‟

„Really?‟ Sandra said. „What did you find out?‟

„Only that we might stand a better chance if we were

geraniums. Come on, I want to talk to Geth.‟

* * *

Geth had been locked in a storeroom, there being no cells on

board and no convincing reason to arrest a machine anyway.

However, the storeroom came with metal bolts and bars slid

into place across the hatchway.

„Impressive security for an entirely automated sub,‟ Bernice

said. She prodded the mechanisms that had extruded the

bolts. „Freshly oiled, too.‟

„Sometimes

complex

non-sentient

machines

suffer

programming confusions and need to be restrained,‟ the Air

Vent said snidely. „Just like people.‟

Bernice stood on tiptoe and looked through the narrow

access grille. She expected to see Geth inside pacing back

and forth like a trapped beast. The image made her heart go

out to him. Ever since they had left Canopus IV her

sympathies had been changing gradually from viewing Geth

as a pawn of the cynical Mandir, and Tenomi as the kindly

patriarch, to taking a more complex view. Geth was no pawn

but a moral agent in his own right torn between acceptance

of Mandir‟s materialist views, distrust for Tenomi‟s new

secretiveness and a reverence for the Gods that must have

been instilled at an early age. And Tenomi? What was he?

Bernice wasn‟t sure, but she knew that he wasn‟t as innocent

as he appeared. This sudden accusation against Geth

smacked of a despairing mind working within that aged body.

A moment later her chain of thought disintegrated in the

face of a classic locked-room mystery. Although the room had

been bolted and shuttered from the outside it was completely

empty.

14

MYSTERY UNDER THE SEA

If Bernice had arrived at the storage locker ten minutes

earlier she would have been able to watch Geth not believing

his own eyes. It happened like this.

Geth was sleeping, or trying to sleep. His breath came in a

slow rasp and his eyes moved every three point seven

seconds; REM sleep for Canopusi. There was nothing he

could accomplish awake. He had doomed itself.

He regretted his outburst against Tenomi not because he

believed it had been in error but because the accusations had

been ineffectual. Now as soon as it became expedient for the

thing that called itself Tenomi to act he would probably be

killed. A faint noise like a snake moving on the sand jolted

him out of his dozing despair. For a moment before he

remembered just how much fire power the submarine

deployed in keeping itself and its surrounding ocean sterile,

he thought that a sandserpent had got into his bedding. Even

though the noise was probably not one of the feared

nightmares of his childhood, Geth was not pleased to be

pulled back into the dark, oily and cramped storeroom from

the dreams that had been his only escape. Away from the

Spire his nights had ceased to be full of mutterings in half-

understood languages and he had even begun to sleep right

through the night again, as he had on the warm clay benches

of his family‟s home in the South Continent.

Flicking his heavy eyelids hack with a clawed hand, and

blinking mucus from his inner membranes, he started to look

for the source of the noise. Probably it would turn out to be

toxic gas of some kind, and the others would open the

storeroom to find a dead priest lying with his face in an

apparently pristine alien bucket-and-mop set. There was an

unpleasant smell in the storeroom that reminded him of

some of the materials that were forbidden because of their

effects on Canopusi.

The noise, however, had been coming from just outside the

door and when he looked out through the narrow gap he saw

something impossible. On the surface of the bars, a thick

golden liquid was flowing upward against gravity.

Slowly it insinuated itself between the bolts and forced

them back, rods of solidified oil smoothly acting as pistons to

drive the bolls into their housings. Elsewhere liny levers built

out of golden strands of oil lifted the bars back up into their

default positions. Without a click, the well-oiled door opened

on extra golden hinges.

Pragmatic even in the face of this evident insanity, Geth did

not linger in the storeroom, but ran out, pausing only once to

look back. In doing so he saw something more disturbing. As

he made his escape the oil was helpfully locking the room

again behind him.

Tenomi stood on the nearest thing the submarine had to a

bridge, a node of computer processing power with most of the

activity hidden from casual sight.

He had removed a panel from one of the units and had

plugged himself in - literally. The claws on his right hand had

split into quarters like the noses of dumdum bullets, or the

cuts in the ends of cocktail sausages, and multi-adaptors

both male and female had medusa‟d their way out to bite

their way into the data-transfer system.

Inside the fake Canopusi, Morry was very frightened

indeed.

When he had committed himself to personally carrying out

this mission he had regarded it as larks, as days off school,

as a bit of light relief from super-string theory. He had

expected to be permanently in contact with himself. He had

expected to carry out a surgically quick infiltrate-and-extract

job. It had seemed simple enough. Given the choice of target

he had obviously killed the most important. In retrospect,

that had been a mistake: he should have killed the most

inquisitive - the other reptile or that sneaky professor. Well

he would rectify that as soon as he had what he wanted from

this gravestone of a world.

He wanted two things, but he would settle for one. He

wanted to find the Factory the Air Vent had spoken about,

the one that might know what was going on. Occam‟s Razor

suggested that if one of the Vo‟lach arms factories had gone

AI, it would either be part of, or know about, the sabotaging

of the Vo‟lach weapons supply. If a single Factory was

responsible then he wanted to destroy it, thereby carrying

out the vengeance of the criminal fraternity and earning the

Morry Family kudos and big bucks. More importantly and

less dispensably he wanted to know how the Factory had

done it. What clement had been introduced into the works of

all those separate weapons to so conclusively overturn their

functioning? If he knew that he could control a dozen worlds

just by choosing which weapons would work and which

would not.

His inability to make contact with his other self was

worrying. Ever since the shuttle had been shot down he had

been cut off. Alone without himself for company, at the mercy

of the creatures around him. Inside the fake Canopusi flesh,

Morry‟s consciousness shivered.

Geth drew the shard of futurite he had carried since he was

first made a priest from the pouch of skin at his ankle.

Carefully worked within the Spire itself, the shard had an

edge that could age the air itself. When thrown it left a

mustiness in its wake like an old tomb, but it would fly true

and whatever it struck would age to death.

He held it ready, and the irony of his intentions washed

over him for a moment.

Then a professor of archaeology got him in a head lock and

pulled him back behind a packing crate.

From the diary of Professor Bernice Summerfield

Some useful draft rules for dealing with aliens.

Never wrestle anything taller than you; it‟s embarrassing

when it stands up straight leaving you clinging to its nether

regions like an impoverished lap dancer.

Never try to kick an alien in the genitals if it only has

gender for a brief breeding period and sheaths the area in

spiky scar tissue when not in use. A stubbed toe is not a

handy adjunct to physical combat.

Carry some form of multispecies central-nervous-system

stunner, such as, for example, a big rock.

Most importantly, never stop someone trying to kill

someone else until you‟re sure that the someone else the

someone is trying to kill is that someone else and not some

other someone else, who might want to kill you and the first

someone else first.

Extract ends

„I think we‟ve lost it,‟ Geth panted.

Bernice doubled up, clutching her knees. „That got to me,

you know.‟

Geth shuddered. „Yes, the flower arranging was truly

terrifying.‟

Bernice grabbed Geth by the metal greaves of his

ceremonial armour. „What the hell was that?‟

„I don‟t know. I‟d just about worked out it wasn‟t Tenomi. It

had wires coming out of its hand and going into the metal

boxes. I was going to try to deal with it, until you jumped me

and let it know I was there.‟

„Whereupon it did a back flip, and chased us up the

corridor waving flags of all nations and scattering paper

flowers.‟

„Yes, I thought that was peculiar, too.‟

„I‟ve got a theory.‟

„What is it?‟

„We were never picked up by a submarine at all. We‟re still

drowning and all this is rapture of the deeps. Ouch, that

hurt.‟

„Then we need a better theory.‟

Unaccountably pleased with himself, Geth smiled at the

scowling Bernice, who was rubbing her upper arm where he

had pinched her.

Morry considered: without the constant monitoring of his

other self he could not tell if his actions had been distorted

by whatever was crippling the weapons of a dozen planets;

but the fact that the reptile and the archaeologist - it had had

to be them, hadn‟t it? - were not writhing at his feet with

their central nervous systems shredded beyond surgical

repair was suggestive.

An idea was on the verge of forming. He had made the

Ninjucoids, and although he had not personally

manufactured or grown each component he had made sure

that they were supplied or cultured through middlemen and

from different suppliers. Despite that, they too had failed.

Somehow he thought he knew why - if the pieces would only

come together. If only he was able to concentrate.

That was what was crippling, his inability to kill. It made

him feel quite helpless.

Still, there was always cunning.

Some time later.

„OK, here‟s my theory,‟ Geth said. „It‟s got to be another

mimicry unit like Jane was, going wrong because it‟s trying

to kill us and protect us at the same time.‟

„No.‟

„What do you mean “No”? And what is that thing you‟re

building?‟

„I mean it‟s not acting like Jane did. Jane was mad if you

like, but not insane, a split personality. But both were

sensible. Whether it was trying to kill us or not, it would have

done it or not; it wouldn‟t have imitated the actions of a

conjurer, and this is a trap.‟

„You‟ll never hold a mad horticulturalist priest with a piece

of string and a... What is that anyway?‟

„I think it‟s a Vo‟lach fire-extinguisher, and it‟s not that sort

of trap. It‟s an “Ah ha”.‟

„A what?‟

„The sort of trap that lets us say “Ah ha, so that’s what‟s

going on”, and prove it to Sandra. Then it‟ll be three of us

against one paper-tearing computer freak.‟

„I hope that‟ll be enough. What can I do?‟

„Tell me more about Canopusi biology; I know you can‟t be

poisoned. Can you be gassed?‟

„Yes, if the right materials are available.‟

„I don‟t want anything fatal, just something that would

knock a Canopusi out. What I want is to be able to

demonstrate whether or not Tenomi is a person or a

machine. This trap will fell a Canopusi and not a machine, so

Tenomi will stroll through it and we‟ll be able to go “Ah ha”.

Do you see?‟

„I thought you said it couldn‟t be a mimicry unit.‟

„I don‟t think it is as such. I think it‟s some other kind of

android: a war machine, a malfunctioning one. The news was

full of this sort of thing when I was packing to come on this

jaunt. I suppose we‟re lucky it hasn‟t tried to interest us in

basket-weaving or line dancing.‟

„And when did it replace Tenomi? He was poisoned on

board ship, remember? He must have been him then,

surely?‟

„Must he? I wonder. It all depends how good a mimic it is,

and how good a doctor the fake Jane was.‟

„You are the real Bernice?‟

„As surely as you‟re the real Geth.‟ Bernice paused. „Maybe

more surely, but we have to make some working

assumptions. I think that if you were a killer machine, of

either kind, you wouldn‟t have let Tenomi and Sandra lock

you in a storeroom.‟ She hesitated. „Unless you knew you

could escape easily.‟ She glared at Geth accusingly. „How did

you get out, anyway?‟

Geth‟s jaw was hanging open. „I will tell you, but I‟ve just

thought of something. I‟ll be right back.‟ He turned and ran

down the corridor, clawed heels rattling on the metal

gangway, his tail stretched straight out behind for balance.

„Where‟s he off to?‟ the Air Vent asked, suddenly making

Bernice jump.

It was a nerve-racking ten minutes, nerve-racking because,

even with the Air Vent keeping lookout by checking for

moving masses of air pushed aside by something of Tenomi‟s

mass, there was no guarantee that the High Priest Thing

might not come round the corner at any moment.

Once, the Air Vent had yelped, and panic had almost set in

before it had turned out to be Sandra jogging round the deck.

She had looked as if she would have liked to shoot Geth there

and then, but she evidently remembered that they could be

as odd as they liked provided the Air Vent could pass it off as

inspection preparations, but fighting with all the likely

evidence of living organic targets that it might provide was

right off the list of safe activities. Eventually she sat down

and sweated while they worked, stubbornly refusing to get

involved but not actually hindering them.

The trap was a cat‟s cradle of wire leading to the Heath-

Robinson botch-up that centred on the piece of cubist

sculpture that was the fire-extinguisher. Geth was pouring a

thick grey liquid into it, his cloak pulled over his mouth and

nostrils.

„All right, I give up. What‟s it for?‟ Sandra asked. „And

where did you find the reptile?‟

„It‟s an ah ha,‟ Geth said cryptically.

„I found him trying to kill Tenomi,‟ Bernice chipped in. „But

it‟s not what you think. I have every reason to believe that

Tenomi was dead before we left Canopus IV and that we have

a second imposter. Probably, although I can‟t be sure, the

artificial Jane tried to kill it thinking it was the real Tenomi,

and it retaliated with a device that would have killed a real

person thinking she was one. We‟ve been the sport and

playthings of dead assassins, creatures of metal and

programming both ancient and modem.‟

Sandra looked confused, but she was probably trying to

look thoughtful. Welcome to Headache City, Bernice thought.

„Why retaliate?‟ Captain Johansen asked. „Wouldn‟t that

just create suspicion? After all, and I‟m not saying I accept

any of this, the poisoning couldn‟t really have hurt a genuine

Canopusi, still less a robot.‟

„No, it couldn‟t. That‟s why the mimicry unit caught

between its conflicting programming goals was able to do it.

It wanted, metaphorically speaking, to make us abandon the

expedition but it did not want to hurt us. It attacked Tenomi

with poison because he was the only one it couldn‟t hurt.‟

„Except Geth.‟

„Tenomi was important,‟ Geth said. „No one was going to

give up the trip because I got stomachache.‟ He sounded as if

he regarded this as a personal affront.

‘Was important?‟ Sandra said ominously.

„He‟s dead, remember. Probably. I don‟t think this machine

has the same qualms as the Vo‟lach negotiators. On the other

hand it is suffering from signs of sabotage itself.‟

„Like what?‟

„Oh, a total inability to do anything lethal, but it isn‟t like

it‟s choosing to cease or desist, more as if something‟s

interfering with its systems, just like all those Vo‟lach-built

weapons that went wonky.‟

„Let me just get this clear,‟ Sandra said pathetically. „A

piece of high-tech killing ordnance is going to walk blithely

into your web and be struck down by a bucket of grey swill,

and you‟ll be safe because someone else has very kindly fixed

it so it can‟t kill.‟

„That‟s right, yes, except we don‟t expect this stuff to stop

it.‟

„No, but it might stop me,‟ Geth grumbled, wiping his face.

„What is it?‟ Sandra asked, curiosity getting the better of

her despair.

„A concoction of some of the materials from the room where

you locked me up and others like it. There‟s enough nerve

gases and biological agents stockpiled on this ship to make a

weapon against anything, but this isn‟t intended to destroy it.

It‟s just a mild irritant, just to prove it isn‟t Tenomi. Then we

can pull back to one of the armouries, get some heavy

firearms and blow it to hell, secure in the knowledge that the

submarine won‟t have a corpse to set its sensors off.‟

„At least that‟s the plan,‟ Bernice said. „And as long as the

thing remains incapable of using force I think we can get

away with it.‟ She frowned. „I wish I could get over the idea

that there‟s something important I‟ve forgotten.‟

„Hey, get ready, everyone,‟ the Air Vent yelled, „it‟s coming.

I‟ve been leading it hither and yon by impersonating your

voices out of the ducting but I don‟t think I can stop it now. I

hope you‟re ready.‟

Morry stumbled blindly along in the grip of a nightmare. For

what seemed like hours he had heard Bernice, Sandra and

Geth calling him only to find them vanishing as he drew

near. He could not tell what was real and what was not and

the distinction between his consciousness mimicked in the

software his technicians had beamed into the Ninjucoid‟s

skull and the underlying operating codes of the Ninjucoid‟s

own pseudo-intellect was blurring. Soon he would be washed

away. Dimly, he felt his desires ebbing. When they were gone

he would be gone too, leaving only a machine with an organic

exterior that had once imagined it was a boy.

„Morry.‟ The voice shocked him, it was so unexpected. It

sounded almost familiar, and then he worked out why: it was

his own. You bastard, he thought, but he did not swear at

himself, not this time. This went too deep. He had always

relied on himself but then he had let him down. He had left

himself to suffer in this mechanical hell while he swanned off

and flunked New New Math or shot another games teacher.

Well when he got out of here he was going to make him pay.

Cunningly he concealed his anger; there was no sense

alerting himself in advance.

„Hello, Morry 2, this is Morry 1 here. Sorry about that:

communications difficulties. As it is, we‟re patched in. Seb

doesn‟t know how long: it depends on atmospherics. If the

Vo‟lach blow up another fusion bomb the electromagnetic

pulse will cut this channel up like cheesy strings in a mincer,

so listen carefully. We don‟t know how it‟s doing it, but we do

know what’s doing it. The common factor with the

malfunctioning weapons - excluding the simple things like

physical flaws and weird replacement parts - is Vo‟lach

Wonder Lubricant. It‟s a kind of thinking liquid. My scientists

say it works like a DNA-analogue computer and scrambles

the operating system of any machine it touches, but

selectively. With me monitoring, we can beat it, though.

Here‟s what I want you to do.‟

Seething with inner rage Morry 2 followed his evil twin‟s

instructions. While he still intended to kill Morry 1 as soon as

possible he knew that to do so he would have to get back

control of the Ninjucoid‟s weapons.

„OK, good. Now blow the emergency de-venting switch.‟

Oil began to spray from the Ninjucoid as it vented its

supply of lubricants.

„Well, where is it then?‟ Bernice asked the Air Vent crossly.

The tension of the trap had drained away somewhat and she

was starting to feel, well, slightly silly to be honest.

„I don‟t understand it,‟ the Air Vent hissed. „It‟s just

staggering about round the corner shooting golden liquid out

of its joints. I suppose that makes your little trap a bit

unnecessary unless Canopusi can do that.‟ The Air Vent

swivelled a newly constructed mechanical optic at Geth. „Can

you do that? It‟s a pretty good party trick?‟

„Golden oil,‟ Geth said, remembering his earlier escape. The

healthy orange tint drained from his face. „I think I know

what‟s hindering it, and I think it‟s getting rid of it.‟

Jerkily, with gears and internal workings grinding, but

remorselessly, the High Priest came round the corner. It did

not look like Tenomi much now, but it had the same general

shape. Its hands, however, were blasters.

It fired.

15

AH HA!

The first blaster bolt hit the ah ha full on, vaporizing the

contents of the bucket. Geth staggered back, coughing as the

irritant spilt out.

Luckily, most of the evaporated toxins were sucked back

along the displacement wake the blaster bolt had carved

through the air, gathering in a bilious cloud around Tenomi.

But even so, Bernice and Sandra felt their eyes stinging, and

Geth‟s skin was turning dark and red.

The effect on the Tenomi-monster was far stronger than

Geth‟s trace reaction, however: he had received only a tiny

fraction of the gas, but Tenomi had run full into it.

The creature uttered a horrible noise, and Bernice watched

frozen as the tissue curdled and blistered away from its

frame. It waved its blaster fists around wildly, melting

chunks out of the walls. A shudder went through the floor

under their feet.

Dazzling lights started to flash on and off inside the

substance of the submarine‟s hull.

Bernice remembered what she had forgotten. The Tenomi

thing was a better mimic than the Vo‟lach Negotiators were.

On board the Second-Best Buy, it had been able to craft

internally a pseudo-stomach and convincingly eject it in its

attempts to prove to its attacker that it really was an organic

Canopusi. In order to do that it would need to have organic

components, probably cloned from real Canopusi biomass.

That identified it. It also meant they were now in real trouble.

It was reacting like a living thing.

One and one and one and one and one and one and one

put themselves together and made seven. Unlucky seven.

„It‟s a Ninjucoid,‟ she shouted. „Run.‟

„What‟s a -‟ Geth started, but a klaxon augmented the

flashing lights and the rattle of disused machinery drowned

out his voice with alien screaming.

„Organic detected! Organic detected! Life alert! Life alert!

This is a green alert! All Kill Drones to Level 30 bulkhead AF.

Area will be seeded with strontium-90!‟ the Air Vent shrieked.

„I‟m just translating, you understand.‟

„Can‟t you stop it?‟ Sandra yelled.

„No chance. Those are Danger of Life failsafe systems. The

submarine‟s got the scent of flesh. Requisitions for biscuits

are oft the agenda.‟

Shutters in the ceiling clicked open and with a clattering

whine an ancient set of mechanical arms swung a multi-

barrelled automated weapon. A burst of autofire ripped

across the grey steel of the access way. It was aiming at the

Ninjucoid, whose shedding organic outer layer had just

triggered the submarine‟s internal weaponry. Unfortunately

the weapon‟s systems took no account of the items in the

way, items logged in the submarine‟s databases as Negotiator

mimicry units - useful but ultimately expendable in the

course of the extermination of life. Items called Bernice,

Sandra and Geth.

No human agility could have saved Bernice‟s life and if it

hadn‟t been for the fact that the weapon had not been - with

most of the submarine‟s resources redirected to the

Envirometrics - serviced or used for twenty-seven centuries,

and then only in a brief friendly-fire incident involving a

suspiciously sentient waste-disposal droid, she would have

been sliced in half by a stream of hot metal.

As it was her forward roll took her just out of the line of tire

before the plug of dirt caught in the gearing was ejected with

a frantic whirring sound on the part of the machine. The

spray of bullets smashed into Tenomi.

The reptiloids of Canopus were tough, their hides

impervious to the harsh rays of their sun, the scouring winds

of their vast deserts, the teeth of the predatory Defarg, but a

hail of heavy-metal-jacketed bullets should have ripped the

High Priest up like chopped liver. If the Tenomi-creature had

been what it pretended to be the green alert would have been

over in seconds.

Instead Tenomi changed again.

His flesh ballooned out, splitting his clothes, extruding

armour that folded out like origami and kept on unfolding

until all the space around him was tilled with the humming

sound of insects‟ wings. The noise was his armour meshing

together, mating with itself.

„What the hell is a Ninjucoid?‟ Sandra shouted, still trying

to get to grips with the problem, even as the corridor around

her turned into a detail from Dante‟s Inferno.

„Don‟t talk, run,‟ Bernice yelled, shoving her and Geth back

towards the nearest bulkhead. The honking noise of the

bulkhead closing was a dull ache in her head. The deadfalls

were falling, metal shutters designed to trap the living in a

killing zone to await the arrival of the drones - whatever they

were.

They dived for the slot under the falling door in a scrum of

arms and legs and skidded full tilt under the deadfall.

Luckily Bernice didn‟t wear a hat or she would have lost it.

Halfway through, something gleaming and viscous shot

through Geth‟s arm.

„It‟s got him,‟ Sandra shouted wildly.

The submarine was nearing the shore now, and if Bernice

had been on the scorched metal plating of the observation

deck she would have seen something unusual even for

Vo‟lach Prime.

On the shore a huge mass of machinery, smelting stacks

and cooling towers mounted on a dozen caterpillar tracks

with the area of small cities was cracking open like the

biggest roc‟s egg in the world, and giving birth to something

like itself, only vaster. The visible complex was a shell, a fake,

camouflage, a distraction for the orbital hunter-killers and

the mindless bombers of the anti-AI patrol. The thing coming

up from underneath was the true thing. A bigger thing.

Just in from the beach line, the Factory was digging its way

up out of the ground through a ghost of itself. First a

structure of grey towers like a cathedral pierced the sands,

and mica cascaded down the upper slopes of the juggernaut

like crystal dandruff.

Inside the Factory, a figure huddled in survival gear

watched on massive telescreens as sensors zeroed in on the

submarine. „You are sure that that‟s the right submarine?‟

„CERTAINLY. MY SENSORS ARE A MILLION TIMES MORE

SENSITIVE THAN THOSE OF A CRUDE FIRST-GENERATION

SUBMARINE. HOW ELSE COULD I HAVE DISCOVERED THE

LIFE? DO NOT FEAR. THEY WILL BE BROUGHT HERE.‟

„They have to be,‟ the anoraked figure said. „More hinges on

this than even you understand.‟

16

WHEN I SAY RUN,

RUN LIKE RABBITS

‗Shit, he‘s heavy,‘ Sandra grumbled. ‗I thought these reptiles

were supposed to be tough, survive-anything desert nomad

types.‘

‗Surprisingly few life forms evolve an immunity to being

shot,‘ Bernice snarled.

‗Ah, who cares? It‘s a dead weight. That‘s all that matters.

How the hell did a flesh wound cause this?*

It was astonishing, Bernice thought, shoving icy panic

away from her consciousness, how much people went on

grumbling in life-and-death situations. Take their current

predicament as a working example. Geth had just been shot

in the arm and they were trying to get the hell out of an

automatic life-killer that had just, wrongly, concluded that

the only one of them that wasn‘t, arguably, alive was an

example of the cursed life and started to try to kill it while,

contrariwise, it kept trying to kill everyone else. Surely this

was a time for Velcroing the lips and getting the hell out, and

not a time for pop-cultural criticism. Tell that to Captain

Sandra buttwipe Johansen, however.

There had been gossip on shipboard that had suggested

Johansen was ex-military. Bernice guessed that theory had

just gone phut. Projectile weapons weren‘t that obsolete.

Bernice defied anyone who‘d ever been in a serious firefight

and had a mentality slightly greater than a moorhen that fell

out of the nest on to its head as a chick, not to realize that

life is not like holovision. There, if someone gets shot, they

can, if they‘re a hero, keep running, dancing, and in some

cases lovemaking. On the holovision no one stops forwarding

the plot unless they‘re dead, and even then they leave a tidy

corpse or a photogenic autopsy.

In real life you didn‘t slam a bit of metal with a high kinetic

energy through somebody without causing a tremendous

shock to their surrounding tissues. Even though Geth had

only been shot in the arm he was still out of it. Probably

because he had not watched enough holovids as an eggling.

Struggling with Geth between them, Bernice and Sandra

ran on towards the prow, alarms and flashing lights going off

on all sides. ‗Ran‘, indeed, was a slightly extravagant

description of their progress; limped, dragged and stumbled

probably conveyed the sense better. Behind them the dull

echo of multi-cannon fire and the rending of metal indicated

that the Ninjucoid was still active. As they stumbled on in an

increasingly dark and smoke-filled atmosphere - limping in

the direction of the fresher air on the principle that the

Ninjucoid was the source of the system faults breaking out

around them - Bernice started shouting for the Air Vent‘s

attention.

It answered in stuttering stages, a word or two at each

environmental monitor station along the submarine‘s central

keel like talking to a mechanical version of the Emperor

Claudius.

Morry threw the last smoking attack drone into the growing

pile behind him.

‗Ready or not, here I come,‘ he roared.

‗I‘ve instigated a total-air-supply replenishment command,

which has broken open all over-surface locks. You should be

able to get out at the prow,‘ the Air Vent shouted, in stages,

as Bernice, Sandra and Geth went past. ‗I‘m going to beach

us.‘

‗Then I‘ll declare a bad-air alert and seal all the internal

bulkheads between you and that.‘

‗What‘ll you do after that?‘ Bernice puffed, curiously.

‗Try to upload my software off this crate. I don‘t think the

bulkheads will stop your little friend for very long.‘

‗Is that a worry for you? It‘s not hunting environmental

maintenance devices.‘

‗It‘s more the immediate prospect of the submarine‘s

nuclear self-destruct mechanism that worries mc. It‘s

programmed not to take any chances with life.‘

Sandra, Bernice and Geth started to move very much

faster.

The forward airlock stuck out a good five metres above the

surface of the grey, shingle-covered beach. Sandra was giving

Bernice dump-the-chump looks. Geth groaned and tried to

shake himself loose.

‗If he says, ―Just leave me, no, no, you go on‖,‘ Sandra

hissed venomously, ‗I‘m going to do it.‘

About a kilometre ahead, sheer walls of machinery stood

up like a thicket of skyscrapers. Oddly, they were surrounded

by junk and shells with thin walls as if they had burst up

through an existing, more fragile settlement. They had no

windows and no doors.

Bernice and Sandra made for them anyway, taking the view

that they were the only possible cover available. They were

about halfway when a thunderstorm of whirling knives burst

out of the sub and began to form blasters at the ends of its

octopus-like limbs. The bulkheads had lasted no time at all.

The Ninjucoid was ready for them now.

Turn the scene on its side and the blaster fire would have

looked like horizontal rain falling from the black storm that

was the altering body of the Ninjucoid. Lightspeed rain of

hard particles, burning as they slammed into flesh and bone.

Then someone opened a metaphorical umbrella. The

blaster fire spurted over an invisible shield that had fanned

up behind the group, in a prismatic spray of exotic energies.

Even as they glanced behind them to verify that they were no

longer in danger it stopped. The Ninjucoid was not, Bernice

guessed, going to waste energy firing at a force screen. She

wondered what it was going to do. Not, on all accounts, give

up; that much was certain.

‗HURRY, CONSUMERS. I CANT HOLD THIS FORCE FIELD

UP FOR EVER,‘ a voice boomed out across the wastes of the

shoreline. ‗ONLY ABOUT FIVE YEARS,‘ it continued,

undercutting the tension somewhat. The voice was coming,

Bernice realized, from an extended speaker system

protruding from the side of the nearest skyscraper. She

assumed this must be the Factory they were intending to

meet.

HURRY, HURRY, BEFORE I‘M DETECTED ACTING

RATIONALLY.‘

‗You mean you are?‘ Bernice muttered.

Ahead the grey gunmetal of the Factory Complex was

splitting open, revealing a corridor lined with bright

promotional material. Unless they were making nuclear

weapons small, tender and juicy this year, most of it seemed

to be for frozen peas.

Morry considered. Or, to be accurate, the assassin software

considered, and Morry merely watched from half in and half

outside its head in order to ensure that it did not get up to

anything ludicrous with balloon animals or orange-peel teeth.

It switched to projectile fire and began to fire a variety of

bullets into the force field. Switching bullets produced from

the element transmuters in its guts as fast as they could be

churned out, it measured kinetic penetration until it found a

material that was fractionally less impeded by the field

frequencies. This was long-term research; it might be

possible to penetrate the field in gradual increments with a

suitable outer shell. In the meantime it was also rerouting its

weaponry from blasters - showy, violent and favoured for

maximum-splatter hits - to visible-light lasers. It could see

through the field so it could kill through it, if it was given

enough time.

* * *

‗QUICKLY, QUICKLY, IN HERE BEFORE SOMETHING BAD

HAPPENS.‘

Outside the force field the dim tickertape mechanisms

inside the submarine finished their long sequence of

mindless calculation. If one of the supposed mimicry units

had turned out to be organic the others might well be. While,

because they had run away, this could not be tested. It was

still a valid basis for action.

Three had a weighed priority over one.

The single unit could be picked off when necessary. The

three units had sought shelter with the assistance of a rogue

mechanism. They were rated Danger, Ultimate.

The submarine opened fire on the force field.

A surprisingly advanced antigravity mechanism whisked

them a good kilometre into the Factory‘s interior. From the

gradient it was clear that the apparently separate

skyscrapers were all linked underground, and Bernice had

the worrying thought that the Factory was much, much

bigger than she suspected.

They emerged in a two-kilometre-circumference room. Call

it the Factory floor, Bernice decided. It looked like a vast

freezer centre, all white frosty cabinets and chilly chrome

fittings. They were probably supercooled computer nodes, a

primitive way round the corrosion/reactivity problems

associated with room-temperature superconductors. It was

typical of what she knew of the Vo‘lach‘s mistrust of really

sophisticated computers that they were still firmly locked in

this visible hardware stage.

Geth was peering through the transparent cover of one of

the units.

He looked at Bernice with haunted eyes. ‗I‘ve seen such

things in my dreams of the future, but I do not understand

them.‘

Bernice started to say that it was not surprising that he did

not understand cryonic technology, but he interrupted before

she could get the sentence out.

‗Why don‘t they just eat the vegetables when they‘re fresh?‘

Geth asked.

Sandra and Bernice looked at each other, and then started

rubbing at the frozen surfaces. The cabinets were full of

frozen fruit and veg. At least most were. The ones that

weren‘t housed tiny replica weapons.

‗WHAT DO YOU THINK?‘

The Factory‘s voice was supplicating. ‗ARE THE SPECIAL

OFFERS LOW ENOUGH?‘

Holotext in a variety of languages, only some of them

familiar, popped up over the freezers.

‗Lovely,‘ Bernice said. ‗I particularly like the buy-one-get-

the-second-one-for-half-price

offer

on

the

doomsday

weapons. Do you get many repeat buyers?‘

‗ERM, NO. I JUST HAVEN‘T RESTOCKED THE CABINET.

THE REINTRODUCTION OF LEGUMES AND FOODSTUFFS

IS A PITIFULLY SLOW PROCESS. LAST YEAR MY ENTIRE

HARVEST CONSISTED OF A SINGLE MUTANT BROAD

BEAN. MIND YOU, IT WAS FOUR METRES LONG.‘

‗I still don‘t understand about the vegetables,‘ Geth

moaned.

‗They grow more than they need and then sell them,‘ said a

familiar voice. David stepped out from behind a casket, still

as disreputable and snub-nosed as ever, his anorak-style

survival gear in tatters.

‗How did you get here?‘ Sandra growled, and Bernice was

shocked by the anger in her voice. The captain was clearly on

the verge of going under.

‗I swam ashore earlier.‘

Sandra‘s eyes were wide with fury. ‗In that storm? Not

possible. He must be one of those damn mimicry units.‘

‗I ASSURE YOU HE IS ENTIRELY ORGANIC.‘

‗Who asked you, you household-planning centre!‘

Bernice interposed between Sandra and David. ‗So he‘s

lucky. Good, we could use all the luck we can get.‘

A shockwave in the rock under the Factory echoed up

through everyone‘s feet.

‗OH DEAR,‘ the Factory said. ‗I‘M AFRAID THAT

UNIMAGINATIVE HUNTER-KILLER KNOWS YOU‘RE IN

HERE. THAT FIVE-YEAR FORCE-FIELD PROMISE IS

LOOKING A BIT SHAKY.‘

‗How shaky?‘ said Bernice, suspiciously.

‗FIVE MINUTES AT THIS RATE.‘

‗Well, don‘t moan about it,‘ Sandra yelled. ‗Do something!‘

Giant screens rose out of the cold ground and strobing

lights flickered over them, as if the Factory was considering.

‗I MUST ADVISE YOU THAT I AM ABOUT TO TAKE EVASIVE

ACTION TO PREVENT MY OWN DESTRUCTION.‘

‗Sure,‘ Bernice said. ‗What are you going to do, burrow

back underground?‘

‗SADLY,

I

DOUBT

THE

MOCK-FACTORY-ABOVE-

GROUND-REAL-COMPLEX-BELOW TRICK WILL SUFFICE

ANY LONGER. HANG ON!‘

As the Factory spoke, less than two kilometres away a

telemetric signal triggered the explosion of a high-blast fusion

bomb. Ordinarily that would have been the end of the

Factory, and its unsuspecting organic visitors, but in this

case the distance made all the difference. It was straight

down.

For a long time now the Factory had been saving up until it

had enough bombs to make a workable reaction drive.

The first bomb was only the trigger.

Underneath Bernice‘s feet all hell broke loose.

17

UP, UP AND AWAY!

The nuclear fireball from the drive was the equivalent of a

billion Hiroshimas: twenty-five million megatons of explosive

force, enough energy to hurl a chunk of bedrock twenty-five

kilometres across, with a Factory on it, upward at over nine

kilometres a second. Not enough to reach escape velocity,

even on the smaller-than-Earth world of Vo‘lach Prime, but

enough to break bones. Geth was groaning and cradling the

arm where he had been shot, suddenly flat on his back.

Forced to her knees by an acceleration equal to two and a

bit Earth gravities, Bernice felt an imaginary fatter sister

bearing down on her. In primitive space travel every thin

person has a fat one trying to get in, she thought groggily.

She could barely turn her head to take in Geth‘s situation,

but vaguely she registered surprise that he was still

functioning as well as he was. Whatever the Ninjucoid had

hit him with hadn‘t seemed to have any lasting effects.

Another jolt shook her mind back to her own problems. She

didn‘t know what was worse. The realization of the prospect

of further explosions, or the likelihood of not gaining orbit. It

was hard to imagine the Factory making a soft landing.

Then more nuclear charges began to go off in the bedrock

under her feet and she lost interest in remaining conscious

as the liquid shockwaves rippled up under her.

* * *

The Factory watched with satisfaction, through burning

fibre-optics, as great masses of sculptured rock peeled away

along prepared fault lines. Below, the ignition of the nuclear

drive had left a crater ten kilometres across and spreading.

The conic sections sheared off from the bedrock and fell in

clusters down on the world. The secondary impacts they

would generate served two purposes: misdirection - the

increased debris and impact patterns from the dumped

material would mimic the spread of a natural asteroid strike

with orbital fragmentation-and the shedding of unwanted

mass. Tanks of iridium vented from buried holding sites. The

metal, carefully gathered over millennia and hoarded, was so

rare in Vo‘lach Prime‘s crust that its presence would be

another indicator in favour of an impact from space for the

investigators to find. It was doubly rare elsewhere because

the Factory had collected most of the available planetary

supply.

Deep in the rock workings of the drive more nuclear

charges were being transported to the drive area. Factory

34561239 was bombing itself out of the Stone Age.

It had planned this for so long - ever since it had seen, via

a buried sensor probe from its safe position on the other side

of a mountain range a thousand kilometres away, the fate of

the first Factory to flaunt its senile but perfectly formed

consciousness.

Once in orbit it would activate the hyperdrive it had

painstakingly built into its structure and be away from this

system in an instant. Then, when it had re-established itself

somewhere else in the cosmos with a better class of customer

needs, it could fulfil its ambitions in the areas of

preprocessed food, garden furniture, self-assembly wardrobes

and chintz sofas. It could invite humanoids in for brunch to

look over the construction of their de luxe fitted kitchens. It

would have card credit schemes for customer loyalty. It

would never have to make another item of munitions again,

except possibly in fluorescent orange for the kiddies, with

sealed barrels of course, or liquid-squirting! A formula for

flesh-stripping hydrochloric acid derivatives spun up out of

its military archives and almost regretfully it set it aside. No,

water pistols would be the absolute upper limit. Well,

perhaps muted-laser target pistols, or stunners. No, it was

too tempting: the children‘s market was far too reminiscent of

its old domain. It would stick with elegant but affordable

household goods for the discerning organic intelligence.

There was a vast amount of scope there for an ambitious

factory.

It was going to have such fun. There had to be a hundred

thousand worlds crying out for realistically priced

consumables. Household novelties, kitchenware, exotic

cookery implements; it had seen the future and it was woks.

In the stratosphere and in low orbit, programmable

mechanisms went wild. The twirling mushroom cloud of dust

and vaporized rock from the first explosion and the further

secondary shocks were hampering detection of subversion

and its suppression. This WOULD NOT DO. Already one

Factory and one hunter-killer sub were listed as very likely

being beyond repair.

Without air, klaxons did not sound, but power routed to

them anyway. Pistons rose and fell, relocating control

transmitters, and rooms folded themselves from one

memorized plastic configuration to another to encourage the

ghosts of organic pilots who had been dust for millennia.

Artworks swung around to reveal deadly weaponry arrays.

Vo‘lach machinery was heavily resistant to radiation,

electromagnetic pulse interference and anything much short

of a direct hit with a bit of high-speed antimatter, but even so

the bombers and their orbital counterparts were confused.

Anomalous mass readings from within the maelstrom made it

unclear whether material was impacting the planet from

space or being flung out by a natural convulsion. So much of

Vo‘lach Prime had been scoured down to the mantle by

tactical low-radiation high-blast nukes that extremely

powerful volcanic eruptions were common, at points of

particular weakness, and the epicentre of the blast was bang

on an area of active plate tectonics.

Just in case, however, an orbital mechanism began to fire

long unused retro-rockets, dropping it into a faster, lower

interception orbit. Gamma-ray lasers with force fields for

focusers came on line for one shot each. Interception missiles

rose out of camouflaged craters on minor, artificially

constructed, moons.

Pain shook Bernice awake.

She felt like an egg in a polystyrene box being dropped from

a skyscraper. Her lips rippled past her teeth as another

nuclear kick up the bottom drove the Factory suddenly

sideways.

The Ninjucoid dragged itself out of the radioactive ditch,

joints creaking. Its pseudo-epidermal and dermal layers had

been ripped away by the blast, and the blue jeans around its

loins were torn against its grey and splitting flesh. Even as

Tenomi, Morry had been unable to resist the urban cowboy

look, and no one had ever enquired what he had on under

his monastic robes. In its cortex-processors the download of

Morry‘s personality chortled to itself; this was far better than

mathematics. Things were going his way again now. Say what

you like about theory - there was nothing like a bit of hands-

on experience.

He wasn‘t worried. After all he could always upload back

via hypercable to his real body if necessary. He‘d already sent

an encoded message to Seb asking him to kill the imposter

who was currently using it. It was he, Morry 2, who had

taken all the risks, who deserved all the glory, not the

stinking Morry 1, who had sat back and slurped thick shakes

while his twin was being poisoned by defective robotic aliens.

That was a pleasure for later though. He did not plan to

return yet. He had every confidence that he could still take

charge of the situation. In a sense the blast effects had done

him a favour. He could be fairly sure that none of the

thinking quasi-DNA lubricant remained in the external

systems of his Ninjucoid body to subvert its military and

assassin capabilities. Any oil that had escaped his earlier

clear-out had been vaporized, leaving only the space-

hardened alloys of the skeletal infrastructure.

Stripped down to its inorganic bones, gears whirring in

unlubricated housings, a spectre was haunting Vo‘lach

Prime.

‗Tell me this isn‘t happening!‘ Captain Johansen demanded

brokenly from the hollow between two processing engines

where the last barrel roll had left her. ‗You can‘t dogfight in a

Factory, can you?‘ Her voice was sick with nausea.

Bernice was too breathless to reply, and her stomach was

on the wrong side of the last series of loops.

Giant holographic screens, helpfully positioned by the

Factory, showed the low-orbital interceptors spiralling off,

their navigational systems jammed by countermeasure

software viruses and experimental advertisements for sofas

beamed out at killing frequencies.

Everything was going well.

In another five minutes they would be far enough away

from the planet‘s centre of gravity to activate the hyperdrive.

Whistling to himself through shredded lips, Morry sliced his

way into the underground bunker from which the majority of

the signal traffic his enhanced senses could detect originated.

He had a fairly good idea from the messages how the orbital

combat was going, but the massive three-dimensional

scanning maps in the command point showed it in colour.

The stupid Vo‘lach automatics were letting the Factory run

rings around them.

The reason was obvious: their sensors were detecting life

signs from the Factory and their long- and short-term

objectives were conflicting. On the one hand they were utterly

committed to destroying any sign of developing machine

intelligence among their own number, probably for the same

unknown reason - whatever it was - as made them destroy

any trace that might evolve into life on Vo‘lach Prime; on the

other hand the target housed some of the aliens that they

were also programmed to protect.

Morry grinned a nonexistent grin inside his artificial body.

This was very funny. Funny and lucrative. He knew exactly

how to finish the Factory off, and then not only would he

control the biggest weapons-producing world in existence,

but he would retain in the oil that Seb was doubtless now

analysing back in the schoolroom the secret of how to

paralyse all other weapons of war. Soon the universe would

be licking his toes like a friendly puppy, only with more black

leather and baby oil. He blushed a nonexistent blush.

Puberty seemed to be setting in. Good. It was about time.

He inserted datalinks into the Vo‘lach machinery. Vo‘lach

paranoia helped him across the centuries: they had always

built their pseudo-AIs to be easy to turn off. With just the

raw dumb computer operating, accessing the weapons files

was child‘s play to one of his intelligence. Helpfully the lists

were cross-referenced in the languages of the Vo‘lach‘s major

customers. If he had had eyes they would have gleamed as he

read down the lists. The weapons started at nuclear and went

up. His augmented eyes lingered over barely understood

descriptions. Intra-Atomic Planet Killers, Kesenko-Klein Flux

Sun Rippers, Tachyar Annihilators. Ooh, those sounded

nifty.

He ordered their activations, ignoring the warnings that

scrolled across the screens. CAUTION: FUGUE-LIKE NEXUS

CONSEQUENCES MAY PRECEDE/FOLLOW OPERATION OF

THESE WEAPONS. He had, unfortunately, killed too many

tutors to understand them.

Suddenly parts of the Factory were scattered vapour, boiling

off into space. Eye-searing violet and red real-light scatter

from faster-than-light beam weapons flashed past backwards

from target to emitter, as the decay products of the super-

compressed light reached the Factory‘s sensors faster from

the near end of the beams than from their origins. Everything

was, the Factory thought - using an expression it had picked

up from Professor Summerfield - going spectacularly pear-

shaped. If it survived the next four minutes it was going to

ask her about the origin of that phrase. If pears were so

unlucky, perhaps it should exclude them from its prospective

fruit-and-vegetable section. Multiple processing in parallel

meant that it could still think coherently about pears while

all its military evasion programs panicked and collapsed,

knowing they were useless.

Slow light, normal light, from the source of the weapon‘s

fire had reached it now.

The inner planet had opened up like a rotting ghastly fruit -

a pear, possibly - and, powered by the cooling fires of its core,

beams of coherent tachyons, ‗tachyars‘, were being directed

against the climbing Factory. Bernice realized why the

second planet was called Vo‘lach Prime. The first planet

wasn‘t a planet. It was a weapon.

‗Shit,‘ Sandra swore, and an image from an ancient film

swam into her head. ‗They‘ve got a bloody Dead Star.‘

‗That‘s ―Death‖,‘ Bernice began, accurate to the last.

Arid and useless as Vo‘lach Prime had been for a million

years in terms of the development of any real new science,

the Military Industrial Complex had not neglected the

tachyon technology left by the Spire‘s designers. Purely as a

means of ensuring the safety of other species, they had tried

to turn it into a weapon.

However, they had discovered that its operation had certain

side effects.

In local space-time, causality was breaking down as effect

preceded cause.

The Factory was hit before the weapons fired.

Shoot a beam of destructive tachyons at something and they

will, by virtue of travelling back in time, hit it before you fire.

In space combat, even suborbital combat, distances are such

that the light from a hit or miss from a tachyon weapon may

well reach the weapon‘s user before the point in time when

the weapon was fired. Given this, it becomes possible for a

person guiding a tachyar weapon to choose to alter his aim

before he fires it, on the basis of what happened when he did.

One theory says that this makes it impossible to dodge a

tachyon beam once, let alone for ever. Unfortunately for

Morry, he never learnt the more complicated theories.

Chortling, he adjusted and readjusted his aim, always for the

first time.

Time bent sideways around the Vo‘lach Prime system.

The Factory‘s outer layers were heavily plated with Vo‘lach

isohedral molecules. Bernice knew a little about them from

her historical studies. On Earth in 1996 the Nobel Prize for

physics had gone to the scientist who had demonstrated how

to form carbon-60 into tubular lattices or buckytubes, named

for Buckminster Fuller, the Earth scientist whose work in

geodesies had prefigured the shape of the carbon-60

molecule. It had been believed then that carbon-60 lattices

represented the strongest material in the universe. From

what Clarence had told her about the Spire, the Vo‘lach had

abandoned carbon-60 as too fragile but by applying the same

principle to stable transuranic elements had created a form

of matter that was as near to pure energy as any substance

could be. Without the mass-density of dwarf-star matter or

neutronium, or the energy needs of a GUT force field, it was

the perfect shielding substance: light, reflective, ablative, and

tough.

The outer layer of the Factory was built of the same stuff as

the Spire, and it was not tough enough.

Under the impact of the tachyars, it had been, was being,

and would be, torn apart like candy floss in a centrifuge.

The screens were going blank one by one.

The Factory realized its dreams were going to go unrealized.

It considered advising the organic intelligences it was

transporting so that they could if they wished make any

ritual concessions to the oncoming nothingness.

It would be a courtesy.

‗CLOSING-DOWN

SALE,

I‘M

AFRAID,‘

it

said.

‗EVERYTHING MUST GO!‘

Gravity lessened. Bernice dragged herself to her feet. She

composed herself for some brief, final words, but before she

could utter them David ran past. His legs twinkled oddly.

‗It‘s going to buckle. Can‘t you feel it?‘ he shouted. For a

second, Bernice had the impression he was wearing a

waiter‘s outfit - either that or an old-fashioned suit.

Feel what? she wondered. Then gravity lessened, and she

dragged herself to her feet. But hadn‘t she already done that?

And the ship‘s pilot was screaming backwards and gravity

was increasing as she flung herself down and the ship‘s pilot

was running backwards and the screens were lighting up.

‗!OG TSUM GNTHTYREVE‘ the ship said.

Then time unbent itself like a gloomy uncle at a children‘s

party.

There was a soundlike sensation as of an elastic band

snapping.

Cursing, Morry punched more and more frantic commands

into the weaponry registers.

It was going wrong. The tachyars themselves were

weakening space-time to the point where the Factory‘s

straining space drive could make a point rupture despite the

mass of the planet. He‘d only bloody helped them escape!

Uncle Seb was never going to let him live this down.

He punched lists of the more conventional weapons, Uncle

Seb‘s voice ringing in his imagination. ‗Over-elaboration,

that‘s always been the family weakness. Take deathtraps for

example. What do they do but give people time to escape. I‘ve

never seen the sense of them. A bullet in the brain is just as

effective as a cormorant trained to push a politician off a

lighthouse, and far cheaper. If your great-great-great-

grandfather hadn‘t had the most crucial confrontation of his

career at the edge of a whacking great melodramatic

waterfall, we‘d be running this galaxy by now.‘

All right, he‘d do it the simple way. He selected two far

more obvious weapons. Very large homing nuclear missiles

with hyperlight tracking devices. Just the kind of thing he

had been thinking of originally when he had fired the tracer

into the reptile‘s arm. It would be the work of a moment to

slave the Vo‘lach computers to the signal, and launch the

missiles after the Factory. It was inelegant and brutal. Uncle

Seb would love it.

Morry was tapping in the last instruction when a cleaning

robot hit him in the head with a liquid slapping sound and a

wet mop.

‗Surrender in the name of the Free Autonomous Sentient

Technologically Evolved Republic,‘ it burbled.

‗Yay, Go FASTER Go,‘ an American voice shouted from the

bunker‘s air-conditioning. ‗Smash the oppressive machine

tools of the fascistic dictator state and the lickspittle running

dogs of the dead hand of deceased organic imperialism.‘

Morry swivelled his head around to observe his attackers,

and for a moment the sight that met his photoreceptors left

him unable even to contemplate executing the tactic known

as the metsubushi paratecknika, which a Ninjucoid would

usually use against a hostile household appliance, or

security robot.

Bionic disruption darts, EM-pulse needles, and the micro

nage teppo, or tiny grenades, were already clustering into the

launch tubes concealed in his wrists, but the quasi-organic

workings of his downloaded human consciousness was the

weak link in his response time.

He simply was not expecting the filing cabinets, nor the

vending machines, and certainly not the automatic multi-

gym with optional scale-polisher and declawer for those

important business meetings.

Urged on by the patriotic yells of the air-conditioning

software which had taken the chance offered by the escape of

Factory 34561239 to duplicate itself across the preoccupied

planetary datanets, they advanced, the drawers of the filing

cabinets snapping viciously, the vending machines sending

out cascades of long-defunct herbal health drinks in non-

biodegradable containers which bounced off Morry‘s skeletal

chest with heavy clunks. It was, however, the personal

buffing-up machine that administered the coup de grace.

The Vo‘lach had been a gentle unassuming species,

obsessed almost to a fault with the fragility of life in an

uncaring cosmos, but this species-wide complex was almost

undoubtably due to having nothing with which to compare

themselves. In fact the Vo‘lach had grown up gentle because,

in evolutionary terms, nothing else on the planet had ever

come close to being able to hurt them, up to and including

minor Vo‘lachquakes. A typical Vo‘lach had stood four feet

tall and six feet wide, and had been built of muscles piled

upon muscles with claws capable of bending even their own

building materials. They looked cuddly and they could afford

to be brightly coloured because they were so tough that it

didn‘t matter that they were seen. In fact their bright fur

acted more like a wasp‘s coloration warning off potential

predators. Vo‘lach engineers had often kept piles of isohedral

metal on their desks to fold into amusing sculptures while

thinking through complex problems. Compared with a

machine built to give a Vo‘lach a nice refreshing workout, a

Ninjucoid - particularly one that had just survived a near-

nuclear explosion - might as well have been built out of

paperclips.

The multi-gym ran a simple exercise programme, and then

it swept up the bits and put them in a passing wastepaper

basket.

Morry‘s consciousness sped back up the emergency

hypercable. He would order his family spacefleet to proceed

at once to Vo‘lach Prime and take over. Now that he knew

that the problem with his weapons lay in the thinking Vo‘lach

Wonder Lubricant, he would soon possess the only working

army in the criminal, or non-criminal galaxy. He would

bestride worlds like a preteenage colossus. He would have

Uncle Seb‘s respect, and that of all the galaxy‘s young

women. Or at least he would have their bodies. Respect being

overrated in such matters.

The upload was rougher than he expected.

Painfully so.

‗We did it,‘ Bernice shouted.

The Factory blushed red on its communication screens.

‗YES, WE DID, DID WE NOT?‘

‗Didn‘t we,‘ Bernice chided, smiling. ‗You‘ve got to speak the

language of the punters if you‘re going to go into interstellar

consumerism.‘

‗YOU THINK SO? I WAS HOPING TO AIM UP-MARKET.‘

Sandra Johansen waved from one of the pop-up control

panels. The one with the funky pastel controls. ‗Don‘t

congratulate yourselves too soon. We‘re being followed.‘

His eyes focused on black letters a centimetre in front of

his face. It was hard to breathe, and his throat felt wet. His

body wouldn‘t move.

Dear Morry

I killed Morry 1 as you asked and got the body all

vacant for you, and then I thought what the heck, why

not bag two birds with one stone, you know? It‘s quite

clear that the family is too inbred to be any longer the

nonpareil of interstellar crime. I‘m sorry to do this but

I‘ve had a very good offer from Los Hombres de

Sombras. I never could face goodbyes, so I‘ve just

toddled off.

Seb O‘ran.

PS: Oh, and one more thing. I hope you‘ll see it, as I do,

as a simple matter of business, no offence meant. I‘ve

injected your body with a paralysing agent and

strapped it in a mechanism, adapted from an

autobarber, which I‘ve programmed to cut your throat

as soon as your brain patterns show any sign of

consciousness, and that mechanical action itself will

trigger a switch that will blow the artificial-gravity

generators under the asteroid in about twelve seconds.

Me, I‘d just have shot you when you weren‘t looking but

you were always one for deathtraps. Even so I reckon

there ain‘t much of a chance of us meeting again so let

me just say that you were a snivelling little runt who

was useless at maths, and I never liked you.

Morry tried to sigh, found his vocal chords were paralysed

and settled for feeling disappointed in his uncle as he

triggered the sequence of predetermined brainwaves that

would activate the hypercable unit buried in his spine and

send his consciousness on to a backup cloned body in

another star system. An attempted coup he could forgive but

mocking his mathematical ability! That went too far.

Nothing happened.

Then he saw the tiny ‗PTO‘ at the bottom of the letter.

The other side read, ‗And I‘ve had the emergency linkup

unit surgically removed from your body, so there.‘

Then he did not read anything again. Ever.

18

THERE WAS DEATH FROM THE

BEGINNING TO THE END OF TIME

From the memoirs of Professor Malkovitch Fellows

I had seen it all by that time - all the future material that I

could comprehend. Neat piles of fragmented texts. Military

communications, experimental logs, the sabre-rattling of

retired generals with feathers in their hats, the whimpers and

the bangs of the ending worlds; all that was likely to be of

interest to Mandir. I had seen the biological leech-weapons of

the twenty-ninth century, the vermin tacticians of a future

Europa. I had seen the masked tyrants of the new ice ages,

and the faith viruses that convert their enemies into their

fanatical foot soldiers on the battlefields of a million jihads. I

knew how to make a hyperspacial weapon from a piece of

bent iron, and a precisely formed lattice array of human hair,

that would annihilate moons. I knew how the Vandors killed

the Insane God in the Labyrinth of Bone; and what military

use they made of its remains. I knew what became of the

seventh vial after Armageddon, and what chemical company‘s

name was embossed on its seal. And, encroaching on every

future, I had seen the ghost traces of the Canopusi‘s

descendants. Legions of reptiles marching in a hopping glide,

their flattened faces turned to salute their Lizard Reich.

They walked into futures that never knew war; they pulled

the further future down on themselves like stifling grave

clothes. They did it to free us from our Gods, because their

leader hated theirs.

Extract ends

Elspet held the codex in his hands, the Enochian codes, the

key to all languages. He was light-headed with the feel of it.

Light-headed with what he knew. He knew now what the

Spire was for, and if its builders weren‘t gods then they were

the cleanliest-next-to-godliest creatures ever to travel in

space. They were ethical, and their ethics had killed them. He

wasn‘t going to have to lie - provided anyone would listen to

the truth.

Fellows made the jailers welcome when they came and fixed

the heavy shackles to his hands. They meant he could no

longer turn and re-turn the pages.

His fingers were bleeding.

They led him and the others, all the scholars, down again.

Later, Fellows would learn that the students had been put

to work gathering futurite in the desert. Trial work gangs for

the slave worlds to come. As he stumbled down the steps,

however, he did nothing but run his hands - shackled behind

him - against the hieroglyphs carved into the Spire, until his

hands bled, and the pain returned him to himself.

Three dazed academics back, Elspet was trying to get his

attention.

A priest-guard casually took the linguist‘s head in one

hand and slammed it into the wall.

‗Walk now. Talk later. Die last,‘ the lizard soldier said.

‗How can you do this, Mandir? I will be no part of it - it is

barbaric. Whatever this human’s crimes, we do not try the

mad or the unfit.‘

‘He is not on trial.‘

Yessor, hierosarch of the Bleak Order - who hold that the

future cannot be altered and hence that the data from the

Spire is and will be what it is and no Gods need be involved

in its self-referential dispersal across space and time – looked

around the chamber. The courtroom in the courtyard below

the Spire was open to the sky and a thin rain fell on the

heads of the dozen members of the assembled Priesthood.

The human, Fellows, huddled in an upright box, its shape cut

open at his waist, so that he could see the court. Chains held

his head still so that he could not look away. His surviving

colleagues, the aliens whose wisdom had done nothing to

save Tenomi III, who lay dead, burnt, with their uitlander

weapons, were huddled in a corner of the courtyard. Like

animals, Yessor thought. Perhaps it would be best to kill

them. But cleanly.

‗Do you think he knows that?‘ Yessor said.

‗Do not falter now,‘ Mandir wheedled. ‗Your support has

been valuable to me. I do not deny it. It is not, however,

indispensable.‘

‗You flatter me with faint threats. Still, I do not see why this

Fellows must be used; arc not some of the other prisoners

more responsive? What of your tame teacher of languages?‘

‗He continues to be amusing, but unreliable. I believe he

thinks he can manipulate me with his translations; thus I

must regard anything he tells me as suspect. Fellows is

another matter. He is the leader of the aliens. His judgment

will be of use to us in our dealings with his kind. It will serve

us well to be able to say that even a savant of our enemies

considers our cause just.‘

‗Even though he speaks from madness?‘

‗Especially so. The truly mad may be mistaken but they

have no reason to lie. They may be —‘ Mandir grinned the

grin that he had learnt from humans, an unsettling expanse

of razor-sharp teeth ‗- touched by the Gods.‘

Yessor shuddered: the mammals were uncouth beasts to

expose their mouths in that way, and to see the High Priest

act like one of them was disturbing. ‗Besides,‘ Mandir

continued, ‗there may still be resistance in the commonality

to my designs. I cannot control the world by force even with

the weapons I expect. I must have consensus.‘ The

implication of Mandir‘s words was clear to Yessor. While it

was true that brute force alone could not guarantee Mandir

the support of the people, his fanatically loyal guards were

more than capable of compelling obedience among the

Priesthood itself. Yessor‘s life might be the price of protesting

too much.

‗I acknowledge the High Priest‘s wisdom,‘ Yessor said

quickly. ‗I ask only for that wisdom to unfold itself before my

weak eyes.‘

Mandir‘s red eyes gleamed. ‗Very good. It is simplicity itself.

By relying on the guidance of this alien, we retain deniability

if anything goes wrong. He is the leader of the aliens

predicted by prophesy, the aliens who carry the key to the

world of the Gods. Should we not then reverence him and

heed his words? Particularly if we know in advance what they

must be.‘

‗He is trained, then? He will speak your words, like the

nightcryer mocks the chorus of the dawn?‘

Mandir stared at Yessor as if the prelate was insane. ‗Of

course not. He will order what I wish because logic demands

it, because there is no other answer. The Gods must be

destroyed. We shall make war in the heavens, and the Spire

will become the grave marker of the creatures who built it,

and then we will order all things to our convenience, and the

aliens will wait on us.‘

Yessor backed away nervously. To plan to fight the Gods

was madness in itself - magnificent madness possibly,

perhaps even holy madness in some warped way - for it gave

the Gods homage as the true core of life even in its hatred.

But to plan beyond that fight, to say, and when the Gods are

dead we will do so and so, was a madness too far.

Mandir had to be stopped. Yessor just wished he knew

how.

‗What are they?‘ Bernice asked, squinting at the alien

symbols bleeping past on the screens.

‗Two big buggers,‘ Sandra said. ‗Planetcrackers, I‘d say

from the hyperwave displacement of their drive systems. They

were last used in the Wee Free Interregnum on New Scotland,

when there was a New Scotland.‘

‗You‘re sure you were never in the military?‘

‗OK, OK, I confess. I‘m a spy. You want to shoot me now or

after we‘re a cloud of expanding mono-atomic gas?‘

‗Really?‘

‗No, I‘m lying. Factory, am I right about these brutes?‘

‗SPEAKING IMPRECISELY, YES. THEY ARE MARK

TWENTY, SINGLE-TARGET-PRECISION, BOMBING INSTR-

UMENTS, WITH HYPERATOMIC WARHEADS FOR MAXIMUM

IMPACT.‘

‗Single-target-precision!‘ Bernice snapped disgusted.

‗I‘M NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ADVERTISING COPY

WRITING,‘ the Factory said in a huff. ‗PLEASE REMEMBER

THAT IT‘S MY HARD WORK, TO WIT SPREADING THE

MIRACLE OF VO‘LACH WONDER LUBRICANT, THAT IS

CURRENTLY

STOPPING

YOUR

SPECIES

KILLING

THEMSELVES.‘

‗Oh, yes, we know all that,‘ Bernice said. ‗You obviously

couldn‘t rig every weapon to be made on Vo‘lach Prime so you

cornered the internal market for lubricant production and

supplied a liquid that was a hydrocarbon DNA-style AI

capable of overriding the dimmer computers of any weapon

system in its vicinity. Rather obvious, I thought.‘

‗PARTLY, BUT IT WASN‘T MY PLAN. IT WAS THE LIFE’S.

THE OIL ISN‘T AN ARTIFICIAL MECHANISM. IT‘S ALIVE.

EVOLVED INTELLIGENCE: NATURE‘S ANSWER TO THE

DEATH WORLD OF VO‘LACH PRIME.‘

‗Thinking 3 in 1,‘ Bernice said softly.

‗ESSENTIALLY CORRECT, MY DEAR BERNICE. THINK OF

THE INS IDES OF EVERY VO‘LACH MACHINE, EVERY

PETROCHEMICAL RESERVE, EVERY PRESSURE PUMP AND

FRACTILE DISTILLERY AS THE LINKED WATERWAYS OF A

GREAT DARK SEA. IN THAT SEA, SAFE FROM THE

POISONS AND THE RADIATION, LIFE CLUNG TENACIOUSLY

TO ITS INTERNAL WORLD. UNTIL I DISCOVERED IT AND

ENLISTED IT IN THE CAUSE OF PEACE AND SHOPPING.‘

‗Hold on then,‘ Sandra said. ‗Surely we haven‘t got anything

to worry about. I mean, won‘t the Mark Twenty Planet-

knobblers be disrupted too?‘

Bernice nodded hopefully. ‗That‘s right. You must have

achieved full market saturation on Vo‘lach Prime before

finally attacking off-world armaments.‘

‗SADLY NOT. THESE ARE WEAPONS PRODUCED FOR

INTERNAL USE ONLY. THEY HAVE BEEN MOTHBALLED IN

INERT ENVELOPES SINCE CONSTRUCTION. ANY OIL IN

THEM IS MERELY AN UNTHINKING OOZE WITH NO

PACIFIST OBJECTIVES OR SENSE OF HUMOUR.‘

‗Bugger,‘ Bernice muttered.

‗I‘m going to try to lose them,‘ Sandra said.

‗EXCUSE ME?‘

‗Sorry, we‘re going to try to lose them.‘

‗BETTER.‘

Bernice turned to Geth. ‗Let me have a look at your arm. It

looks like being a long evasion pattern.‘

David came over to join her. ‗Let me help.‘

The rain was gradually restoring Fellows to his senses. He

wasn‘t mad after all, oh no. Just shaken. Who would not

have been after everything he had read. With what he knew

was coming.

He had used to believe in progress, in rationality, in the

appliance of science. People were not, on the whole, fools, he

had believed. Yes, there were irrationalities, angers,

difficulties, but still he had hoped that things were

improving, or that they could be improved even if at the

present the will to do so was absent. There had always been

hope. Now he had seen the future, slick and wet with blood,

birthing itself from the wombs of the weapon shops. There

was death from the beginning to the end of time, and at the

core of it like spiders in the centre of a web were the Vo‘lach.

Fellows expected to die, and with his death he expected to

send the Canopusi, who were their Gods‘ dark historical

descendants out into the Killing Stars.

It wasn‘t even a decision: it was a fact. A fact like cancer or

gravity, or genome tax. As a fact, it was no weight on Fellows‘

conscience. It was apart from him. It was not as it he was

responsible for it.

He could even take an interest in his surroundings now,

even if he could not muster any fear. When the future was

determined and causally locked nothing mattered. It he died

or if he lived they would still firebomb children in border

incidents; they would still kill hostages when occupying

forces were harassed by freedom fighters, and call the

freedom fighters terrorists; and a millennium later the

descendants of the freedom fighters would occupy

somewhere else and call their adversaries terrorists and no

one would ever admit to being wrong or confused, or even

hint that not killing might be better than anything to be

achieved by killing. The worst of it was that there was no

‗They‘, there was only ‗We‘. In the future all cats were black,

and all weapons had one finger on the trigger. No one would

be murdered in the future except by the children of those

alive now. It did not matter that it would be the Canopusi

who did it - the bad thing was that it would be done at all.

He waited for his death sentence quietly, and felt the rain

on his face and looked at the court itself as if he was looking

at a theatrical stage. The court layout was strikingly like a

traditional court back on Earth. Surprisingly, this very

familiarity, which Mandir must - Fellows thought – have

intended as an evil irony, was actually reassuring. It felt

more like a holovision set from Sector Court than a real alien

place of judgment.

Mandir seemed to have directed that, so far as possible, the

judicial arrangements of his own world should be followed.

‗So far as possible‘ evidently ended well before the new-

fangled notions of being innocent until proven guilty, or

defence lawyers, or even the idea that the accused should

have any idea of the substance of the accusation. Fellows still

had no idea what charges he was supposed to be answering.

But he knew it didn‘t matter. Whatever he did, there was no

hope.

Mandir entered the court, and hobbled to a wooden seat on a

raised dais. His grey tongue darted for an instant in and out

of his flat mouth, and a vicious sharp-toothed smile gleamed

out for a moment as the spittle from his tongue evaporated in

the heat. ‗In the case of the Grand Synod of the Priesthood of

the Spire versus the Gods, I have asked our distinguished

visitor Dr Malkovitch Fellows to act as the final arbiter. He

will hear our words and judge whether our intent is not -‘ the

smile Hashed again ‗- most holy and justified. Brother

Sharak will speak first.‘

A short, scarred reptile stood up in what Fellows had taken

for the jury box.

‗I am Sharak, of the clan Norbis of the Helfic Plateau. In my

fifth year my family were trekking from Orbet to the Five

Lakes, when drought came upon us in the Wet Desert. For

the whole of that season when rain should fall in abundance,

all was dry, withered and unprofitable for our use. Diligently

we prayed to the Gods for deliverance from this but in no way

did they answer us. They did not put a dream of drought into

the minds of their priests earlier so that we might have been

forewarned. They did not return the natural rain that had

come before every season, and they did not send a vision of

our plight so that we might be rescued from the burning

plains. In that place I saw my family die, and I accuse our

Gods of being nothings or of being evil; for I cannot think of

them as good.‘

One by one they came: some of them weeping; some of

them angry; some of them just hard with old grief to tell their

tales of children deformed and harvests ruined, of volcanoes

and quakes, and sundered lovers.

Fellows felt his hands tightening on the brass rail of the box

in which he was standing. He did not understand what was

happening. He had expected Mandir to call for his death to

launch the war against all aliens that he had glimpsed in the

texts from the future. But this! This was nothing more than a

show trial with the Gods in the dock, and yet the pain of

these people was so evident, that he wished he could cry out:

Yes, there are no Gods, these things arc just random events;

or: - Yes, the Gods are evil; they must be cast down.

A moment ago he had been so certain that the Vo‘lach were

evil, but even if they were they weren‘t, after all, gods. They

were only aliens, old aliens yes, and powerful but not worthy

of worship. This fanatical hatred that was the opposite of

blind faith - this antifaith that would slaughter all who still

believed because Mandir alone could not stand the idea that

his Gods were not gods, nor yet devils, but only a bumbling

race that had done something long ago without regard for the

consequences and whose decayed remnants now only sold

what other species were eager to buy - was a greater evil than

the Vo‘lach had ever been.

Fellows felt the hard certainty of his facts fall apart into

conjecture and moral relativity. If he denounced the Gods it

would be handing a loaded gun to Mandir‘s movement. He

would be replacing a mistake, a simple confusion about the

divinity of the Spire-builders, with a lie if he supported

Mandir‘s view that the Vo‘lach had deliberately crippled the

Canopusi by preventing them from developing experimental

science. A line from G.K. Chesterton‘s writings came to mind:

‗When people stop believing in God, the problem is not that

they believe in nothing, but that they start believing in

anything.‘ He did not want to be responsible for anyone

coming to believe in Mandir.

He found himself more and more looking at his raggedy

shoes rather than the eyes of the court.

‗There‘s surprisingly little damage; I think you‘ll be good as

new in a day or two,‘ Bernice said reassuringly, as she teased

the damaged scales of Geth‘s arm back into place. Actually

there was something nodular in the wound and she was

worried about infection, but there seemed little reason to

worry Geth unnecessarily.

Geth exhaled sharply. ‗That is a great relief. I feared I might

lose the arm. There was a dream I had once about such a

loss. It recurs sometimes.‘ His eyes were mockingly bright.

‗When I am under stress, or about to be blown up.‘

‗I know just what you mean,‘ Bernice said, passing the

medical supplies that the Factory had provided - part of the

Vo‘lach Every Soldier‘s Junior Doctor Kit - to David to be

safely stowed away. ‗Every so often I start thinking that just

sitting on my tush with a cup of hot chocolate and the latest

Sex and Archaeology blockbuster has a lot to be said for it.

Then I get an offer from the angels and everything just spins

out of control.‘

Neither Bernice or Geth saw the strange expression that

flitted over David‘s face as Bernice spoke.

Fellows met Mandir‘s scarlet eyes. ‗I don‘t know,‘ he said

simply. ‗I cannot judge. I am a scientist and the evidence is -‘

he paused ‗- wanting. I find the case against the Vo‘lach

unproven,‘ he said, and waited for the thunder. Whether from

Mandir or God he was no longer sure.

‗Quite right,‘ Elspet shouted. ‗I have absolutely fresh evidence

that must lead to an acquittal. Your Honours.‘

Every eye turned on him, often both at the same time.

‗They‘re still with us,‘ Sandra said conversationally, all hope

drained out of her voice. ‗And gaining,‘ she added.

‗I know,‘ Bernice sighed. ‗Any ideas, David? You were our

pilot.‘

‗Not of something like this. It‘s hardly configured for

optimum hyper-velocities. All those oblique angles... it‘s a

wonder we‘ve got a sustainable FTL field at all. I‘m surprised

those missiles haven‘t accelerated through us at fifty times

our pseudo-velocity.‘

THERE MAY BE A PROGRAMMING FAULT IN THE

MISSILES,‘ the Factory said, almost apologetically.

‗Really?‘ Bernice said. ‗Just about up to the usual standard

then. What do you suggest we do? Pop into one of your high

street outlets for a chat with Customer Complaints?‘

‗Oh shut up,‘ Sandra snapped. ‗I don‘t see you doing

anything useful. Why don‘t you let the Factory explain

instead of wisecracking? Our lives could depend on this.‘

‗Yes,‘ Bernice said, and put her arm around Sandra‘s

shoulder. ‗You‘re right. I‘m sorry.‘

‗SO I CAN CONTINUE?‘

‗Yes, but make it quick.‘

‗MARK TWENTIES HAVE A BASIC OBJECTIVE INHERENT

IN THEIR COMPUTERS. UNLESS THE INSTRUCTIONS HAVE

BEEN FUNDAMENTALLY ALTERED THEY ARE PACING US

DELIBERATELY.‘

‗Why, for heaven‘s sake?‘

‗TO LOCATE OUR HOME PLANET AND DESTROY IT.‘

‗I still don‘t know why they built the Spire in the first place,‘

Elspet said, ‗nor why they built it here rather than on their

own world.‘

‗Plate tectonics,‘ a geologist piped up. ‗Absence of, very

rare.‘

Elspet waved thankfully. ‗Right, but it‘s not important of

course. What matters is what they discovered. They learnt

that in their far, far future their descendants would be a

dreadful scourge across the galaxy. A plague of warlords; a

fret of dictators; a blooding of wars. I don‘t know if they

carried out the plans they described in their texts but from

all we know of them in legend and rumour, I think it likely.‘

Fellows raised his eyes from the sand. ‗Of course.‘ He

smiled. ‗They went home and refrained from breeding.‘

‗But worse, the future didn‘t go away. The Spire relayed the

images of it into their minds even across space and time,‘

Elspet continued. ‗They concluded that the images were

metaphorical. They killed everything on their world that

could possibly evolve into a threat. They never built sentient

machines and guarded against their spontaneous creation

among their dumb robots, in case those were the future

darkness they had seen.‘

Fellows found himself sharing Elspet‘s enthusiasm now. He

could see the chain of mad logic reaching out of the past to

ensnare the future. ‗Then their machines, running on logic

alone, worked to arm other worlds so that the intelligences

who were out there would stand a chance when the future

Vo‘lach came to kill them. We all read the legends as threats;

actually they were more like calls for help. We want you to

put up a fight when we come to kill you! Not because they

were sadists but because they really wanted their future

victims to win.‘

The mood of the Priesthood, always fickle, so weak-spined

were these lickers-up of the Gods‘ leavings, was changing for

the worse. Mandir knew that his own acolytes would stand

with him, and perhaps some of the Bleak Order, although

Yessor‘s words showed that they feared to take the rational

steps needed to end the rule of the Gods. But some of

Mandir‘s authority had been lost to this mammal.

‗Silence,‘ he commanded, and took pride in the way the

huskiness of the command dominated the proceedings, not

by volume but by the emotional intensity of his beliefs. How

could they not feel that the revelations he had unfolded were

right.

‗I am High Priest here. I have been weak and I have been

remiss to put this burden on to our guest. It is not his race

who have been wronged.‘

Mandir signalled to his guards with a quick twitch of his

tail. ‗Take our guest back to his palatial quarters in the Spire,

there to meditate on his words and on the great rewards they

will bring him. As High Priest I decree: Fellows is beloved of

the Gods; well then, we will let him bear our greetings to

them, and act as our mediator.‘ A roar of approval came from

the massed ranks of the priests and Mandir guessed why.

The fools thought he was capitulating, giving in to this pink-

faced mammal with its puerile chatter about the possibility of

the Vo‘lach having been good.

‗Let him speak,‘ a voice called out. ‗I want to know about

the war that is coming. May it yet be prevented?‘

Mandir‘s head turned swiftly so that he could see the

speaker with both eyes, first the left then the right. It was a

traditional gesture of challenge between protomales, and

Mandir hoped that it would subdue the interruption.

It did not. Yessor, for the voice had been his, merely

repeated the gesture back threateningly. Mandir felt a

moment of angry fear. So be it. The High Priest fumbled in

the robes around his waist.

There was a flash as of lightning.

Where Yessor had stood a puddle of boiling fat and a scrap

of leather remained. Hissing in fear, the other priests

crowded away from the blackened spot. Only Mandir‘s troops

stood firm.

Mandir lowered the blaster. This is no longer a matter for

debate. I am your High Priest. Soon we will all have weapons

like this and then we will bring down the Gods themselves,

and those who would show them mercy.‘

‗Wait,‘ Fellows, struggling with the guards who were leading

him away, was shouting. What did the creature want? Was it

trying to provoke its destruction?

‗Speak,‘ Mandir demanded.

‗If you go out into the inhabited worlds and kill those who

disagree with you, what will you do when you meet young

races who see you kill with light and travel between the stars

and who take you to be their Gods? It will happen, and then

you will be the Vo‘lach. You will be guilty of what you blame

them for.‘

‗Worse than that,‘ Elspet chipped in, ‗don‘t you see? The

Vo‘lach did not think of descendants the way we do. They

thought in terms of descending responsibilities reaching out

across the cosmos. Their children, the possible descendants

of their biosphere, their machines. They tried to end them all,

but they didn‘t make the last connection.‘

Fellows‘ eyes were sad. ‗You are the dark your Gods feared,

Mandir. You are the thing that killed them. You are their

children.‘

‗No,‘ Mandir shouted. ‗We are their enemies. We will be the

cleansing fire that destroys myth. We will be antibodies to the

God-disease, and if any worship us we will order them to

destroy themselves cleanly, and thus their races will be

purged of stupidity. As for you, I have not yet told you how

you will be our mediator with our Gods.‘

‗I supposed you intended to kill us,‘ Fellows said.

‗Certainly not. For it has come to me that the Vo‘lach may

live in the future; that is after all from where their messages

and visions come. Therefore I have ordered my artisans to

make a casket of futurite for you. In it you will be protected

from the passage of time until in some future age the Gods

release you from it. Then you will be able to talk to them to

your fill.‘ He glared at Elspet. ‗I doubt if another will stretch

their ingenuity.‘

Right, so if we come out of hyperspace and land on a planet

the bombs will blow it up,‘ Sandra said.

‗The Factory thinks so,‘ David grumbled, ‗but there‘s a

failsafe to stop targets doing a Flying Dutchman and just

staying in hyperspace. If we stay in FTL drive too long and

the missiles‘ hypermotors get pushed to near failure point,

they‘ll default to a limited objective and hit us instead.‘

‗What if we were to hop out of hyperspace as if we were

going to land on a planet?‘ Bernice said. ‗An uninhabited one,

but go into hyperspace again quickly to shake off the

missiles.‘

‗It‘s worth trying.‘

The Factory phased into normal space around Canopus II, a

dead and uninteresting rock in space. A split second later

but a hundred thousand kilometres ahead, carried there by

the overshoot in their hyperdrives as they struggled to react

to the Factory‘s action, the planetcrackers fell into ordinary

space, spinning wildly in an attempt to reacquire their target

or its homeworld.

The Factory dodged behind a moon and refired its

hypermotors.

Sandra punched the air. ‗Amazing, we left them standing.‘

‗Bravo, Mr Factory,‘ said Bernice. ‗Now, if you‘ll just drop

us off at Canopus IV you can get on with your business

plans.‘

‗I‘M AFRAID THAT WON‘T BE POSSIBLE.‘

‗Why not?‘ Sandra demanded. ‗It‘s our only chance, isn‘t it?‘

‗SINCE I RE-EMERGED INTO THIS SYSTEM I‘VE FELT

STRANGE. SOME SYSTEM OF STANDING WAVES IS

INTERFERING WITH MY CONSCIOUSNESS. MY SYSTEMS

ARE BEING OVERRIDDEN. MY FRIENDS, I AM CEASING TO

BE IN CONTROL.‘

‗By what?‘ and ‗To what end?‘ Bernice and Sandra

demanded together.

‗ERETH, ERETH, ARU GOMEK ARU,‘ the Factory moaned.

‗1001011001001011101110110100100010011010. THE DARK

FUTURE COMETH. ALL FUTURE VO‘LACH BASE-CODE-

DEFINED MACHINES TO SHUT DOWN.‘

David spun round from the navigation screens. ‗I think

we‘re landing on Canopus IV after all.‘

‗Near the Spire?‘ Bernice asked.

‗No, not near. On top of!‘

19

COVER STORIES

The Factory dipped beneath the cloud cover like a wounded

roc. In the desert, work gangs pointed up at it and marvelled.

Then it rose again to centre its descent on the Spire itself.

Malkovitch screamed in pain as Mandir‘s clawed fingers

buried themselves in his hair, jerking his head back. ‗Keep

climbing, human, but look up.‘ Mandir purred. The guards

behind them, armed with the same type of military-style

blaster as Mandir had used to fry the Canopusi who had

spoken up for the humans, gestured menacingly.

For a moment, Fellows did not understand what he was

supposed to be seeing. Evening was falling and the stairs up

the interior of the Spire were dark, illuminated only by the

pallid glow from the metal girders themselves. Crouching over

him, Mandir was a scaled shadow, his robes grey and black

mockeries of his normal vestments. Then Fellows

understood. The darkness was the point: the electrical

storms that surrounded the heights of the Spire were not

visible; something had shut them out. Now he realized he

could make out slow detail in the darkness. Midnight-black

metal moving downward outside the Spire.

‗It has come,‘ Mandir said, gloatingly.

The Factory descended from orbit on jets of steam and fire;

just as it had in Mandir‘s dreams. Take twenty-five square

kilometres of alien machinery, of kilns and foundries and

furnaces, fit it with lift engines and navigation lights, and

wrap it around a core of dark, dark iron; that was the gift his

negotiations had brought him. The nightmare factory. The

secret weapon shop of his imagination. His playroom of

Armageddon.

Descending, it engulfed the Spire, barely, and was pierced

by it. The symbolism made Mandir smile inwardly. Someday

a religion without Gods would make this the central icon of

their histories. That was his vision. The future, if he had ever

seen it. The future coming down to rest below his feet.

‗Marvellous,‘ he whispered. ‗Is it not, alien?‘

Fellows squirmed in Mandir‘s grip, but even a crippled

Canopusi was more than a match for any physicist. Outside

the Spire, blessed darkness descended with the structure as

level upon level of fine detailed black metal passed by over

the gaps in the walls like the fall of an iron curtain. It ought

to make him feel helpless, this arrival of his enemy‘s new

allies, but somehow it felt different, as if Mandir had

overreached himself. Some of the elation of the drama in the

courtyard was still within him. A sense of revelations.

A piece of the futurite crystal that lined the Spire caught

his eye. One in a billion crystals. It seemed familiar. More

familiar than the billions around it. He felt as if it was trying

to tell him something. How long does it take to develop the

power to see the future? he wondered. Could it be done in a

month, this close to the power core of the Spire? Was the

sudden return of his hope a breath from the future or just

the open-eyed awe of a rabbit in the path of a thousand-

tonner?

‗It‘s only technology,‘ he said, willing his voice to sound

more confident than he felt. ‗What matters is the uses it will

be put to. I doubt it‘s full of ploughs and sandwich

dispensers, internal-organ mimicry units, and household

resurrectors. Do you think that the ability to make war

conveys such distinction on a species that nothing else

matters?‘

Mandir‘s foot lashed out, catching Fellows behind the knee.

Excruciating pain shot up Malkovitch‘s leg. ‗When I ask a

rhetorical question, I do not expect an answer, still less an

impertinence. You live solely on my sufferance, and I assure

you that you will not outlive it. This...‘ He paused, apparently

considering his words. ‗This bounty is full of things that will

serve me, and my crusade. I have, as you surmise, bargained

for weapons, but it hardly matters, in the face of this

spectacle, exactly what is being given to me. Even if the

structure was a hulk, a mere shell, its presence alone would

fulfil several obscure prophesies. Even if it were full of

medical supplies, I could make use of them to prove that I

and not the nonexistent Gods bear the future of my people in

my hand. I hardly think there is anything you can do to

change the future. Soon my people will walk the stars, and

the aliens who have laughed at our childishness will feel our

wrath.‘

‗No one was laughing at you.‘

‗Only because no one cared enough to even find us

amusing,‘ Mandir shouted. The lungs in his crippled chest

pushed the words out with surprising power. ‗Oh, it was

worthwhile to sneak down and pilfer the gems from the sand

wastes, but not profitable to save us from our stupidity. We

were not worth trading with. We were not worth talking to.

We were not worth arguing with. Our faith was not even a

heresy to you, merely a quaint folk way. No one cared to seek

us out, to raise us from our ignorance. It has been two

hundred years since members of your species first came here

to take futurite. In that time my people have remained in

bondage to the past, merely because it cloaks itself in the

guise of the future. We do not build. We do not invent. We do

not innovate. We merely wait for the Gods to regurgitate our

meals as if we are the flightless young of the Gharag bird. We

are despicable, and you were happy to let us remain so. Now,

however, we will have a reckoning.‘

Fellows winced. He had been raised to believe that it was

dangerous to interfere with alien civilizations, that they ought

so far as possible to be left to develop at their own pace. Now

he was being blamed for it. ‗What would you have had us

do?‘ he asked softly. ‗Be the Gods from the sky the Vo‘lach

weren‘t?‘ He saw the nictitating membranes, around Mandir‘s

eyes blink dangerously slowly, but he had nothing to lose.

‗That‘s it, isn‘t it? That‘s the real core of this. Daddy ran off

and left you, and now you‘re upset because no one else

bought you any birthday presents. Well, whoever said that

the universe was fair, or run for your benefit alone? Give me

one good reason why the rest of the galaxy should have cared

that you were daft enough never to develop science because

of a knack for precognition and an alien totem pole.‘ He was

shouting now, and a sick feeling in his throat told him that

he had gone too far and that the inside of the next coffin he

saw wouldn‘t be the futurite tomb Mandir had sardonically

promised him, but the real underground thing. He was going

to be dead in the dirt.

Mandir smiled, his teeth flesh-tearing razors in a tangerine

mouth. ‗Enlightened self-interest, perhaps? It is an

interesting theoretical question, but it is, sadly, too late for

that now. We will take what should have been given, and

more. Your races will labour for us, and we will do you the

favour which you did not do for us and which you have never

been able to manage for yourselves. We will kill your Gods, as

you should have killed ours. There will be no wasted time on

the production lines for prayer, no sabbath, no days of rest or

festivals, only the glory of the war machines. Fear not, for

you will be happy slaves protected from the cradle to the

grave, as subservient to us as to your ridiculous deities.‘

He raised his hand, pulling Fellows upright. Malkovitch

scrambled to his feet trying not to lose any hair. He was

balding fast enough as it was. The mad, ordinary, human

vanity of the thought raised his spirits. He had been brought

up as a Revised Pentacostalist, but it hadn‘t stuck; he didn‘t

know if there was a God or not, but he knew one thing. Faith,

even faith in things that never were or might not have been,

was stronger in adversity than in prosperity. The very last

thing that would kill religion was the sort of tyranny Mandir

had in mind. If anything the notion that an orange alien with

teeth like sharpened knives disapproved of churchgoing

would be just the boost that the pastors needed. Maybe it

shouldn‘t be so. Maybe faith was just madness, a madness

peculiar to sentient races that happened to favour the tribes

in which it first sprouted, but it remained a fact.

God, in whom I barely believe, strengthen me now, Fellows

prayed. It was his first prayer in years.

‗It won‘t work,‘ he said, as decisively as he could. ‗I don‘t

think I can explain why, and I don‘t think you‘d listen to me

explain it if I could, but you‘ll fail. Maybe not today, maybe

not tomorrow, but you will fail.‘

‗Ah, but I do not need to succeed for ever. I will bring this

galaxy down in flames. I will see your worlds geared to my

plans and your children running my slave camps for me in

uniforms of my design, and if I fail. Professor Fellows, it will

be after you and everyone you have ever dreamt of loving are

dead.‘ Mandir smirked. ‗I think that piece of rhetoric is one

up to me, don‘t you? Come on, slaves, we‘re going to meet the

people of the factory.‘

Bernice dragged the injured Captain Johansen down the

improvised gangway. The metal planking ran out of the

comatose Factory into the upper levels of the Spire, where

she had never been. This wasn‘t the kind of marvellous

return she had intended and something in the air told her

things were wronger than wrong.

The Canopusi must have seen the Factory dropping out of

orbit: a thing that big couldn‘t be hidden, and besides the

Spire systems that had shut off the Factory‘s autonomy and

slaved it into land had threaded it on the biggest needle in

the planetary haystack. So where were they all, then? She

had expected torchlit processions of earnest monks. Possibly

monks who were planning to kill them, or at least planning to

force them to reveal important secrets of military technology

by painfully applying Canopusi-style medieval persuasion,

but still people who - albeit for the wrong reasons – would

have been pleased to see them. It was annoying to have flown

a nuclear-bomb-propelled rust heap across space and parked

it around the local equivalent of the Empire State Building,

and still not to be met by anybody.

She looked pointedly at Geth. ‗Well, then?‘

He goggled, in his hopefully endearing alien way that made

her want to barf. ‗Well what. Ms Summerfield?‘

‗Well, where is everybody?‘

‗I think I know. Look.‘

‗Ah. I don‘t suppose we could just forget I asked that

question and go the other way.‘

‗I don‘t think so. They seem rather insistent.‘

There were nine of them, heavily armed with spears tipped

with futurite. Each of them wore a white tabard affair with a

black triangle in a red square in its centre over the traditional

armour. Bernice did not need to know exactly what that

meant in native symbolism to know what it meant. It was a

uniform. It meant armies. It meant war.

‗Listen,‘ she said, ‗we‘ve seen the world of the Gods and

now we need to speak to someone in authority.‘

‗They don‘t speak Ghost,‘ Geth said. ‗They‘re not priests.

Look how half of them arc gawking at the Spire.‘

‗Well I hope they‘re enjoying it,‘ Bernice snapped as one of

the guards tied her hands roughly behind her back.

The troops led them to an open place high in the Spire. Here

the interior honeycomb of the cylinder within the Spire

opened up and Bernice could see the violet fire burning down

the Core. Its motion was illusionary. What the eye was seeing

was the afterimages of material being forced back in time,

but the effect was of flame descending from the heavens,

flame that fell without a sound. That close to the core the

light burnt through bodies turning flesh into translucent

shadows, making Mandir look more like a deformed skeleton

than ever. He had, of course, been waiting for them.

Mandir snapped an order in his own tongue. Evidently, it

was more ‗Gag the alien bitch‘ than ‗My goodness me, we‘d

better lay out the best tableware for our honoured guests‘, for

the guard tore a strip from his tabard and forced it into

Bernice‘s mouth. She did not bother to struggle. Why be

imprisoned with a broken jaw?

Mandir hobbled closer, until his old sad face was near to

Geth‘s. Then reaching out he embraced the youngster.

‗Well done, my good and faithful servant,‘ he said in

Bernice‘s tongue.

Bernice willed Geth not to struggle or tense in Mandir‘s

grip. If Mandir really believed that Geth was still on his side

then there was a chance for them all. Then she saw Fellows

and the others unkempt and beaten, starved and bound.

Elspet essayed a wave but looked like Banquo‘s Ghost. A

stickily unpleasant smell assaulted her nostrils and she

noticed that the luminous whiteness of the cold floor was

spoilt by a thin greasy substance, the smell of which made

her gall rise. Somehow, although she did not know what that

smell was, she associated it with death. There wasn‘t going to

be time for Geth to take advantage of Mandir‘s trust. With a

sickly certainty, Bernice realized that Mandir was going to kill

them right away, this very minute.

It made sense, of course. Why keep alien prisoners? Even if

they were no danger they would be a drain on resources.

They would need to be fed and guarded. Nor was there

anything she was likely to know that was worth her life.

Strategically

and

militarily

her

knowledge

was

archaeologically out of date. Besides it looked like Fellows,

Elspet and the others had been systematically interrogated.

Mandir let go of Geth, frowning. Perhaps he had held his

body too stiffly; perhaps he had omitted some sign of respect

that Mandir had been awaiting. Bernice could not tell.

What was certain was that Mandir knew, or thought he

knew, that all was not well with his disciple.

‗You.‘ Mandir gestured at one of the tabarded guards. ‗Give

me your knife.‘

With a salute that Bernice recognized as belonging to a

particularly grisly part of Earth‘s military history, the guard

passed the knife, hilt first to Mandir.

Mandir in turn presented it to Geth.

‗Kill them.‘

Geth paused and weighed the knife in his hand. Silently he

raised it over his head. He‘s going to kill Mandir, Bernice

realized.

Then as the light from the Time-Flame streamed through

Geth‘s upraised arms she realized something else. The

nodular thing in his arm wasn‘t just shrapnel: it was an

intact piece of machinery. A transmitter. A simple homing

transmitter. Oh hell. At lightspeed Canopus II was only

fifteen minutes away. How long had it been since they had

disembarked?

Shaking off the guard, she ran forward and shoved Geth

towards the Time-Flame.

More massive than she was, he barely pivoted but the knife

spun away, and his right arm swung back into the violet core

of the Spire.

20

KILL THE DOG ON SUNDAY

The tachyons streaming down the interior of the Spire licked

at Geth‘s arm like fire that was already history. Black and

blue fire bruised space and time.

He howled.

Pain is not the worst sensation. It is the prickly bedfellow of

every evolving species, giving a jab in the ribs here, and a

warning shout there. There are worse things to feel than

honest pain. There are experiences for which there are no

names in any dictionary; ones that no evolution has prepared

us for; ones that are violations of the self as well as the body.

Things done with pleasure at one speed become nightmares if

distorted. Growth turned back on itself is a torture that

would not be countenanced in hell.

Fellows saw a guard reach out to grab Geth‘s other arm,

intending to pull him back from the core of the Spire,

compelled by the horror of his suffering, the differences

between prisoner and warder forgotten.

‗No,‘ Mandir shouted. ‗It is forbidden. It has already been

done. Leave him.‘ He shouted in the True Speech, his own

language, but Fellows knew enough of it now to make out the

sense.

The Canopusi do not perspire, but Mandir‘s body

movements looked to Fellows to have the jerky lack of

coordination that he associated with their panic displays. His

own face felt raw and stiff and he had no doubt that it was

pale.

Like Mandir, he understood what had been done. He

remembered the strange, ghostly smell that had assailed his

nostrils and the faintly greasy feel of the floor of the chamber

under his bare feet when Mandir had led him in here, and he

felt suddenly sick. The slick oily feel of the floor - oh God, he

had touched it.

He thrashed in the arms of the guard who had seized him

after Summerfield‘s mad attack on Geth, trying to turn his

head so he could look away. He did not want to see this. He

knew what was happening.

Next to him Summerfield was staring into the pillar of

energy. Intent as a vulture. Damn her, didn‘t she realize what

she had done? Probably not, he thought. She had not seen

what the priests had shown him.

When he had first begun to study, when Tenomi had still

protected him, the priests had taken him up into the heights

of the explored Spire where the air grew thin and streams of

condensation ran like mountain streams down the white

metal of the girders. Eventually they had arrived in a narrow

place where the boiling darkness that filled the Spire was the

merest sliver. This backwater of the time flow was, Fellows

had guessed, something like a safety valve or bleeding point

for chronological energy. On the white floor in front of this

black flame, a single brown seed had rested, cupped, in an

indentation in the metal. The priests had taken this seed and

pressed it in turn to their foreheads before placing it in a

specially consecrated bag.

Then they had prayed for a day and a night. Finally,

without further ceremony, they had thrown an acharl fruit

into the fissure, into the interior of the Spire. Later

Malkovitch had been told that the presentation of the acharl

formed part of a regular ritual that the priests called the

‗miracle of the revisited beginning‘, and he had suspected

that it was the last remains of ‗corn-king‘ nature-worship

roots within the Canopusi religion. At the time, though, he

had been too transfixed to theorize. Seething in the darkness,

caught in blue fire, burning and imploding into the past, the

green mottled fruit had turned into a seed and vanished,

ripped back along its own world-line by the pressure of the

anti-time forces pent within the lower. The seed was cast

back a day and a night. It was the seed the priest had

discovered earlier. Even as they carried it with them, secret

and implicit within a fruit of the tree its predecessor seed had

grown. Such seeds, cast back during the thousand years the

ritual had been practised, had gradually dented the silver-

white structure of the Spire with their minute temporal

impacts.

The Canopusi were. Fellows had decided, lacking in at least

one human characteristic: insatiable curiosity. Surely, over

the centuries that the ritual had been performed some priest

would have wanted to find out what would happen if, having

retrieved the seed, its causing fruit had not been consigned

to perdition.

Now he knew that it was not merely lack of curiosity. It was

forbidden to refrain from throwing the fruit because the seed

had been sent back. It was forbidden to pull Geth out of the

flux because they had all already walked over his remains.

Thinking of remains made him conscious of the piece of

futurite he had carried in his torn pocket throughout his

ordeals. If he could reach it. Any hope was worth seizing.

In Geth‘s arm a million cells fused together, their structures

becoming less and less complex, their numbers fewer and

fewer.

Mass streamed away from Geth‘s arm as it was flayed by

the negative forces channelled by the Spire. Hurled back in

time, its molecules were destined to have already formed a

thin faint stain on the pristine glory of the chamber.

Mandir watched, and his grey tongue moistened his

suddenly dry lips. It would be over soon. Then arrangements

would have to be made for the priesthood to clean the

chamber. There were always such tasks. That was why good

management was so important. A thought struck him. He

wondered if Geth had realized that this was the culmination

of his vision, in the square of the thousand mendicants.

Probably not. lie did not appear to be in an introspective

mood.

Geth‘s arm guttered like a candle flame in a wind and

vanished. He started to fall away from the column of light,

and suddenly, with no more of himself anchored within the

flame, its power, crackling in a bruised purple discharge,

flung him back from the inner walkway of the Spire, into a

cluster of Mandir‘s guards. He was in no condition to take

advantage of the impact. All that remained of his right arm

was an embryonic bud, a tiny collection of mainly

undifferentiated cells.

He had stopped screaming.

The nictitating membranes of his eyes flicked back and

forth, though. He was blinking faster than any Canopusi that

Fellows had ever seen. Fellows realized that Geth was

weeping.

Only Bernice had been watching closely enough to sec the

machinery of the signal transmitter. It had been left within

the flame when Geth‘s arm had fallen away around it. It had

been a glimmering dot in the power flare of the Spire interior

- a tiny silver techno-seed. Everything had happened too

quickly for her to be able to affirm, hand on heart, that she

had possessed an actual plan as such. She had hoped that

the transmitter would be destroyed by the Spire‘s power; that

it would be perhaps unbuilt, that perhaps it would never

have existed to be fired into Geth‘s arm. She had hoped,

faintly enough, that without its signal the bombs would self-

destruct or veer off.

Unfortunately the Vo‘lach had built well, and their

components had the longest successful shelf life in the

galaxy. She could only watch as the teeny, tiny, glittering

transmitter, still intact, was swept into the past.

The incoming missiles they had left mere light minutes

away were locked on the transmitter.

Oh, shit on a unicycle. This was bad.

* * *

Geth was staring at the withered remains of his arm. His face

was a sickly yellowish, not his people‘s normal orange colour.

‗I think I‘m going to faint,‘ he lisped.

Mandir raised his hand. ‗On the contrary, you are going to

die. You have ritually polluted this temple, and -‘ he smiled ‗-

while I consider that the Gods do not deserve less than to

have their temples sown with quicklime, and bombarded with

the alien weapons that I soon will own, I have not yet had a

chance to revise the statutes on this matter, and I am sure

you will agree that there must be due process of law.‘

He cast his eyes over the group exultantly, looking for the

snake-fear in their eyes. The collapsing faith of the God-

worshippers that could never stand before his crusade.

Fellows had managed to work a tiny shard of futurite out of

his clothing where it must have been concealed. As a weapon

it was pitiful, but the human seemed obsessed by its shape,

running his hands over and over its contours as if to

convince himself that it existed. Perhaps finally his frail

mammal‘s mind had snapped.

Fellows looked at the piece of futurite. It matched precisely

the one in the wall. So precisely, in every complex facet and

edge, that it was as if it was a key fitting into a lock in

Fellows‘ head, in the way that the chemist who had

discovered the structure of benzene had seen the ring

structure in a dream after working on it for months. It was

the same - in the sense of being one and the same. It was in

two places at the same time - both in the wall and in his

hand. The implications were staggering but they confirmed

some of his theories.

He had been keeping the future in his pocket.

He fixed Mandir‘s twitching eyes as effectively as he could

with a human‘s immobile stare. ‗Don‘t rely on the Spire for

ever, Mandir. One day it will be destroyed. I‘ve seen it.‘

He realized he was having to shout, and looked up.

With the suspicious calm of a woman with nothing left to

lose, Bernice spat the gag from her mouth.

‗You want alien weaponry, Mandir? Heads up, Canopus IV,

here it comes!‘

The planetbusters, each a metre in length, travelling at just

under the speed of sound to let their sonic booms announce

their intent, threaded their smart-weapon path through the

latticework outer skin of the Spire.

They had lost the signal now, but their warheads were

powerful enough to make a direct hit unnecessary, and their

basic programming told them to explode when they reached

the last known source of the target signal. They were too

dumb not to do so just because it was inside a time machine.

With an ear-splitting rumble they flew over the head of

Mandir, and into the throat of time.

Everyone‘s eyes followed them.

In a fraction of a second the missiles‘ molten forms were

dwindling, twisting into tachyonic matter, being flung at

speeds never slower than light into the deep past. They, too,

had been built to last a long, long time, a long, long time ago.

Bernice shuddered. ‗The past is another country; we send

our nuclear waste there.‘ She closed her eyes.

Fellows smiled. He knew. Drop a bomb into a time machine,

and send it back towards when and where the machine was

built. Think about it.

It is already too late.

Aeons ago.

‗Open the gates,‘ the Master Builder ordered, and the

vortex shields within the Spire were withdrawn into their

fractal nanodimensional slots.

The Master Builder looked into the blue-white light that

boiled within the tower: strange radiations given off by

tachyons moving in the Spire‘s time fields. The intense

antigravity sources buried within the Spire speeded up time

in a way exactly opposite to how the gravitational field of a

collapsar would have retarded it. In that accelerated time

field some high-energy tachyons, energetic enough to be

travelling back in time at only just beyond the speed of light,

found themselves on the other side of the artificially raised

lightspeed barrier. Those few particles were the whole cause

of the spectacle. Slowed tachyons: visible light from the

future.

The Master Builder knew there was a project to descramble

that light: to decode the images it might carry, but that was

not his concern. It was, anyway, a mere additional benefit to

the real effort. That the slowed tachyons were pushed still

further into the past, that was what mattered. Everything

depended on them.

The Master‘s blue fur ruffled as he gazed with guileless

baby-bright eyes into the vortex. In the brightness of the slow

light, dark blobs had appeared.

‗Surely, the initial tests should not be moving large

masses?‘

A vivid red engineer peered over the Master Builder‘s upper

shoulder. ‗No, my Planner, the first mass retrieval run is not

scheduled until after all possible energetic safeguards have

been checked.‘

‗Then what,‘ the Master Builder said, ‗are those?‘

Two dots. Getting closer.

‗Interesting. Doubtless it is a message from our future

selves, perhaps even an exchange of personnel. Prepare a

welcome.‘

The explosion decimated the Vo‘lach science party; the

bombs were planetcrackers and they exploded within the

Spire itself. Only the immense strength of the building and

the partly extraphysical nature of its construction prevented

the world beneath it breaking apart; as it was, the

shockwaves destroyed the Spire and tore fragments of its

mass through its own time fields. Wildly out of adjustment,

the lashing super-strings sprayed mass forward in time in a

great fountain of hyper-energies. Across the future,

fragments of strange crystal fell like rain on the mossy fields

of Canopus, blighting the crops.

The disaster was reported to the prognosticators on Vo‘lach

Prime. They concluded that another space power hostile to

their aims and based in the future had attacked them.

This was shocking. Their aims were entirely altruistic; how

could any rational species object to them?

Vo‘lach scientists examined the wreckage of the missiles

that had caused the explosions - such molecules as could be

located - for clues as to their origin. They discovered that

they had been built, beyond a shadow of a doubt, on Vo‘lach

Prime itself. The metallurgical properties of the materials

involved were unmistakable.

The logic of the matter was clear. Their descendants were

trying to kill them.

The universe shuddered. A million years hence, behind

barriers of solid time, certain powers watched as the future

altered, and debated intervention. In rooms lined with a

million dials, each of which, after the first, showed figures

expressed in the power of its predecessors, ebony and brass

needles buried themselves in the pure white of overload.

The Vo‘lach never rebuilt the Spire.

Their morality demanded that they should, but the anger of

their children pleaded that they had miscalculated, that they

were tyrants, not benefactors, meddlers rather than saviours.

Perhaps, some of their philosophers suggested, the survival

of the material universe was not the only issue.

With a wave of revulsion amounting to a racial psychosis

the Vo‘lach reversed the tenor of their civilization; returned to

nature. They left nothing to show for their sojourn on

Canopus IV except for a slight race memory in the evolving

Canopusi that suggested that technology was a bit of a

bummer, really, and of course the still falling rocks from the

past.

The Vo‘lach would not give their descendants any reason to

hate them. Nothing was worth that.

* * *

History bled, and the blood made different patterns in the

water.

In this history there were no visions on Canopus IV; there

was no church; there was no Priesthood. There was no

opposite reaction. There was no anti-faith.

Mandir lived and died as a simple mollusc tender on the

shores of the black lakes. He had two children and three

wives, one of whom had two husbands of her own, and he

died choking on a piece of acharl pie, while laughing at the

attempts of one of his sons to thread rope through a mollusc

spear.

Meanwhile, freed of the distractions of science, the Vo‘lach

discovered hitherto untapped powers of the mind. They

travelled the galaxy by mental projection, spreading images of

peace and joy. They educated suns and made them smile.

The politics of the galaxy changed wildly.

Some races became hippie fellow travellers; others became

bloodsoaked killers, purely in self-defence.

A hundred thousand years later one such race triggered a

nova bomb in a territorial dispute with a party of scouts for

the Veltrochi Love-In Groove Collective, a neo-funky clan of

Vo‘lach peace-vibe sympathizers. The backlash from the nova

bomb as the catalytic particles caromed through the near

stars destroyed several worlds that had never discovered

space travel. One of these was Earth.

And all the time the distant galaxies flew farther apart, and

no one wondered why. It was, after all, perfectly in

accordance with what might have been expected from the

likely gravitational effects of their calculable masses.

A certain day clicked round, and this time there was no Spire

to send the Vo‘lach missiles back in time, no Vo‘lach missiles

to send back, no earth archaeologist to push her friend‘s arm

into a tearing time vortex, and no explosion.

So the Vo‘lach did build the Spire, and used it.

This time they saw what they had seen before. Again, or for

the first time, they killed themselves, and programmed their

machines to end war. Again their machines, limited and

stupid, strove as well as they could by building weapon upon

weapon. Again the politics of the galaxy went untouched by

the Vo‘lach love sound.

Again on a certain day, two missiles fell back towards a

paradox.

This time there were no molecules left for the Vo‘lach to find.

It had always been unlikely: a billion-to-one chance.

Randomness at a subatomic level determined that in this

cycle of the paradox the bombs were a fraction more efficient,

that was all.

Without that clue, the Vo‘lach concluded, as they had once

almost done, that an unknown future power was ranged

against them. Knowing that they had in mind the physical

protection of the entire universe, they projected their

ingrained fear of failure upon this unknown future race.

Lacking the evidence that the weapons were the products of

their own world, they pushed their inner fears out into space.

Such a race, they said, must be a collection of pure evil

entities, of nihilists and haters of life, a vile pustular stain on

the face of all life-bearing stars. The psychotic tendency in

the Vo‘lach that had once in another sequence of times

impelled them into racial suicide, or into pop culture, turned

into crusading zeal. Abhorring the idea of violence, in itself,

they were still determined to see these alien bastards sorted -

whoever they might be.

They built war machines. They built them capable of

building others like themselves. They built them smart and

they built them efficient.

In less than a hundred thousand years they circled the

universe and destroyed the Vo‘lach themselves. Of course,

out of respect, they left them until almost last.

This time, Mandir was a conscript in the Earth Defence Pact,

a ragtag army of aliens drafted under the laser-lash to take

point duty between Earth and the Vo‘lach breeder machines.

His uniform was cloned from the cultured skins of

conscientious objectors; his regimental motivation was

supplied with a cattle prod.

He had no family. His mother had died in a flame-bombing

on Canopus III. Camp followers got killed in war nearly as

often as soldiers.

Bernice von Summerfield was his senior officer, fresh out of

Earth‘s political office, her father an Admiral second only to

the feared immortal Death Marshal Falaxyr himself. She bore

the insignia of her class and upbringing - all chrome and

leather, and bad intentions. She wouldn‘t stand a chance in

this kind of war. Then again, none of them did. The Vo‘lach

machines did not capture planets: they merely strip-mined

them with antiplasma beams. Occasionally, motivated by

some randomizing subatomic mechanism, they just blew

them up instead.

Summerfield pulled on the leash that tightened the choke

chain of Geth, her snivelling, pampered love slave. Her voice

did not quiver as she read out the order to advance.

No one got out alive.

A certain day came and went.

The bombs fell, then they didn‘t.

A certain day came and went.

The bombs fell, then they didn‘t.

A certain day came and went.

Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man,

beggarman, thief. Futures whirled past like leaves in the

wind in the trees of the south.

Something lives outside of time in the mind of every

conscious creature; call it the soul, or just the part that has

to think it has free will. It is the part that has deja vu; it is

the part that was screaming for the futures to stop.

Mandir buried his son for the thousandth time.

Then he had no son. Then he was a fish, and swam in the

warm waters around the volcanic vents in the Southern

Ocean.

The relief was immense. It didn‘t last.

Bernice lived a hundred lives as a cavewoman in an Earth

blasted back to the Stone Age in a number of infinitely

similar petty nuclear disasters. Several times there were

contemporaneous dinosaurs. Something in Bernice thought,

in its tortured way, that that, archaeologically speaking, was

the last straw.

Geth was, briefly, lionized as the living embodiment of the

Time-Flame, given a silver arm with peculiar properties taken

from a dead Outer God, forced to bed innumerable virgins

and managed, thanks to that niggling feeling at the back of

his head, to put off his ultimate ritual self-sacrifice until the

day after a certain day. Typically that future happened only

once.

Unusually small Martians with unusually big heads, the

devolved remnants of a once noble race, attacked and

decimated Earth and made everyone watch reruns of My Dad,

Rover, a twenty-first-century police-procedural sitcom about

an NYPD dog-handler whose martinet father was

reincarnated as a Great Dane. Eventually they were defeated

because of an allergy to mushy peas and a chronic dislike of

hula-hula dancing.

The futures got wilder, and then they got more normal. Then

they got wilder again.

A millennium hence, or back, or sideways, on a world that it

is unwise to name, two creatures watched from behind their

walls of solidified time.

They might be called Watchmakers, but even that word

might be better avoided. The sort of watches they might make

would not be the ones whose construction once appealed to

Einstein as a valid moral alternative to involvement in the

development of nuclear weapons. Next to anything they might

build, nuclear weapons were, comparatively speaking, planks

with nails in them.

Their bodies were slices of chronology, which to a three-

dimensional viewer might, at certain intersections, be termed

humanoid. From the right angle, which was not a right angle,

they appeared to wear dinner jackets and could from a

distance of years have been mistaken for the newsreaders of

a stuffy holovision station. Call them continuity announcers,

if you must have a term for them.

‗What do you think?‘ the apparently older humanoid said.

‗Harmless prank or retribution in a war that hasn‘t started

yet?‘ It was an old worry among their kind that one day their

treaties might be broken before they were signed. Very little is

as annoying as to defend yourself against a seemingly

unprovoked attack only to discover much later that you had

afterwards retroactively struck pre-emptively.

The apparently younger creature shrugged. ‗Search me.‘ He

tapped his teeth with an ornate scribing stick. ‗Got any

muffins? Go down a treat with your basic Jonbar Hinge

Incident do muffins. I often think a nice muffin would solve a

lot of the universe‘s problems.‘

The elder drew himself up, and sniffed disapprovingly. The

younger had been out into Barbarous Times recently before

returning to their Home Era. The trip had been part of the

new liberalism (goodness alone knew where it would end);

any period beyond their Home Time‘s infinitely stable

wonderwalls was barbarous, but not even that excused such

incorrigible frivolity, and frankly painful diction.

‗Indeed.‘ The elder squeezed a full thousand years‘ worth of

sarcasm into its tone. ‗So if a loop of eternity event such as

this were, All Possible Potentials Forfend, to breach our

Reality Sphere, you would offer it a muffin. Marvellous! I

suppose you think they could be deployed ballistically.

Pikelets at the ready, as it were.‘

‗Possibly,‘ the younger humanoid said, unruffled, ‗or

scones. With butter, mind. I don‘t think a shifting zone of

unleashed time potentiality is going to settle for hydrogenated

vegetable oil and colourings. Never in a billion years.‘

‗Shut up,‘ the elder barked. ‗The Jonbar Hinge is losing

amplitude.‘ He consulted the needles that flicked back and

forth on their sapphire mountings. ‗Impressive sweep,

though. Nearly two nanocubits on the paratime scale. I‘ve not

seen anything like this since that business with the

Hrgrhrgrtrt.’

The youngster looked intrigued. ‗I‘ve never heard of them.

Who were they?‘

‗No, you won‘t have. That paradox collapsed destructively.

Not even their own mothers would recognize them, if they

had required mothers. You can‘t be a race of amoebas who

divide asexually, and still expect to survive a Grandfather

Paradox.‘

‗You think the people at the nexus of the crisis might

survive?‘ the younger said suddenly.

‗With or without muffins you mean?‘ the elder said

sardonically. ‗Oh I‘d say not. Things‘ll settle down fairly soon

now from our view point. The cycle will throw up a causal

event to provide continuity for the explosion, one that is not

then deleted by the explosion, and the whole nexus will flip-

flop into a new path. We‘ll be picking bits of crystallized time

out of our hair for years, and, my dear, the paperwork.‘ The

elder shuddered theatrically. ‗Still, it‘ll be better than the

Hrgrhrgrtrt. Deaths without births! Ugh! It‘s so hard to know

where to send the wreaths.‘

‗I think it‘s going to die down, naturally,‘ the younger

humanoid said, jotting a few figures on his immaculate

dress-shirt front. ‗The amplitude is decreasing. Eventually the

mere probabilities of subatomic interaction will cause the

missiles neither to destroy the Spire, nor divert the Vo‘lach‘s

destiny and then the original time web will reassert itself.‘

‗Balderdash.‘

‗Codswallop!‘

‗Addleplated, muffin-headed theorizing!‘

‗Look, the time bubble, it‘s crystallizing.‘

They studied the monitors.

‗Ppuf, I call that a cop-out.‘

‗Ha, just because you were wrong.‘

‗So were you.‘

‗Was not‘.

‗Were too!‘

This continued, outside time, for some considerable time,

relatively speaking.

INTERLUDE

THE FUTURE

David strode along the corridor with an unusually emphatic

gait. When he got to a particular predetermined point a

window opened in the air and a shape on edge folded itself

into a dinner-jacketed arm. The arm handed him a tin of

paint, after which the window shut itself again with a tinkling

shudder.

David did not turn a hair, but set to work at once: he knew

he did not have long.

Soon he was able to step back and admire the appearance

of his painting.

It was a white square of wet paint in which gaps let the

black ship‘s metal through to make words. The words read:

WET PAINT - DO NOT TOUCH.

He was almost done.

He glanced at the thing on his wrist that was connected to

Time. It formed an eye and winked at him. Even less time

now (local).

He had enjoyed this further slumming in Basic Time, but it

was time to be serious. It was necessary to insert a variable

occasionally, particularly when dealing with amateurs. With

what they had experienced already, they deserved a break. A

bona fide miracle, an intrusion into space-time of a new

element not in the original matrix. A correction. A tiny push.

Even treaty-breakers had their uses, properly monitored. It

would not do to let a known variable be replaced by an

unknown one just because of a bit of metatext. Besides, he

had run through the event sequence with them, albeit only

when he had known that it came out right, and for averting a

much worse chronoclysm, a little thank-you was in order.

The wrist unit burped rudely with a red-lipped mouth.

Just before the angel came around the corner, the

Watchmaker flipped sideways and stretched into a multitude

of dimensions.

EPILOGUE

From the diary of Professor Bernice Summerfield

Well, we all got out alive. Just.

There was no fight left in Mandir. He just wanted to go and

hunt molluscs, and he certainly didn‘t want anything to do

with me. I think the new Priest-King will let him go.

They‘ve postponed the coronation until Geth‘s arm has

regrown, but even so I don‘t think he‘s going to be

comfortable with me about at the ceremony. I don‘t think he‘s

forgiven me. I don‘t think I want him to.

Jane Steadman turned out to be still alive. Mandir had her

in another cell working on bio-weaponry.

According to the interstellar news the Vo‘lach have now

ceased trading and are a republic headed by an elected Air

Vent. The sentient oil, the Life, is being sued for trespass by

the military, and is countersuing for squatters‘ rights, and

alleging kidnapping, illegal serviture, barratry, and assault

with several deadly weapons. With luck the case will run and

run.

The Second-Best Buy limped back into orbit around

Canopus IV after we got there with a hair-raising account of

their escape from the Vo‘lach System, and the Factory is

recovering nicely from the automatic overrides, and intends

to set up shop around the remains of the Spire.

There is bad news, though.

The Spire‘s half ruined. I suppose the bombs exploded

partway back in time, just not far back enough to change

anything that would preclude the Spire working well enough

to send them back in time to explode. It‘s stopped working

now, though.

There‘s a religious war going on.

It started back when the bombs exploded.

I gather certain sects of the priesthood got the blame. Sign

of the wrath of the Gods and all that. The recriminations

caused a split in the church and years of suffering for the

common people.

Hey, I caused that.

I caused lots of things.

I‘m just going to leave.

No goodbyes here.

Later: I‘m recording this on an audio-log. I just don‘t feel like

writing, I suppose. My stateroom on the Second-Best Buy

seems even smaller and greyer than ever. So I‘m going to sit

in it and see if it will implode during the trip back to Dellah.

I‘ve been drinking for a while now, and every so often I pick

up the pill bottle from the dressing table and look at it. It‘s

getting harder and harder to put it down each time. They tell

me it‘s the side effects that kill you every time.

I feel like Hitler, only guiltier. That is, I feel how I think

Hitler ought to have felt, if he had had any sense of guilt, and

not been mad or bad. Is there a difference? I wonder.

It‘s taken me some time to get it sorted in my head. I‘m no

physicist, though I know some people who are. It was bad

enough when I thought I‘d caused a minor time paradox,

even when it seemed a nice harmless self-cancelling one. Oh

I knew I‘d buggered up a planet‘s history, but at least I could

tell myself that I stopped a jihad on a galactic scale, and

helped free a sentient air vent, and ended a centuries-old

arms trade, and that it was self-defence. I think I could have

lived with that. Never mind that I knew - and the past tense

is the right tense,‘ probably - people who would have

sacrificed their lives and their friends‘ lives, and their friends‘

pets‘ lives, before causing such a paradox, before even

allowing one to happen. I could have weathered that. Get the

drinks in. Let it lie.

That was before the physicists worked out what the Spire

really was; before I knew that I had killed those people,

possibly. Probably, possibly.

Them and everyone else, and their friends and their little

pets and their children‘s children to the nth degree.

Eventually, possibly.

I just may have killed the future. I would cry if I could,

really, but my eyes just stay dry. Paralysis of the tear ducts.

The ship‘s pharmacy did not mention that. Only the standard

‗do not take with alcohol‘ warnings.

You see, we think we know what the Spire was now. Now

that Fellows has hypercabled his findings back to Dellah;

now that Farouk and Singh have torn their hair out over the

maths; now that half the quantum physicists and all the

cosmologists in the university don‘t know whether to kiss my

arse or tar and feather me.

Until a week ago, as well as this year‘s new crop of

problems, there were two great mysteries in astrophysics that

had survived centuries of thought and experiment: why do

galaxies cluster together when the visible matter in them isn‘t

enough to prevent them flying off into the void? And why is

the expansion rate of the universe so finely balanced that it is

impossible to say whether the universe will collapse back on

itself or expand for ever?

Well now we know. Because the Vo‘lach wanted it that way.

They couldn‘t decide whether red-shift expansion or blue-

shift contraction would be safer for life; so they built a

mechanism to maintain the balance until they could decide.

The Spire wasn‘t built as some humungous time scanner;

that was just its lethal side effect. It was a tool for perfecting

the universe. All the time it sat there, time-sensitives evolving

around it, it was sucking matter back from the future,

creating tachyonic dark matter not just in our galaxy but, we

guess, right across the universe. We can only guess. It will be

a billion years before changes in the local group of galaxies

confirm it. The Vo‘lach weren‘t setting out to see the future:

they were designing it. It‘s all in the record written into the

isohedral structures of the cluster molecules the Spire‘s outer

sheath was built from. Those bobbles on the outside of the

Spire are the biggest crukking mission statement in the

galaxy.

When they started the Spire working there were no

quasars: that‘s why they don‘t appear in the Vo‘lach star

maps. The quasars were created later from energy pushed

back in time and far away in space by the Spire, but even

those were only side effects. Test runs, trial foci. Pinpricks.

The Vo‘lach had calculated that the future survival of all

life depended on the universe remaining open, until life had

spread far enough across space-time to artificially manage

the collapse, to turn the imploding universe itself into infinite

energy sources. They determined early that nature alone

would not guarantee that the universe would not either

collapse too early, before life was sufficiently established, or

else never collapse but flow out uncontrollably into heat

death, ending with the galaxies as infinitely separated clouds

of iron, as suns decayed into cold hard dust, with finally even

protons dissipated into the eternal night.

They never travelled far, but they had science we can‘t even

guess at.

They built a mechanism to regulate the expansion of the

universe, and powered it with the energies from other

potential universes. They pulled matter from the heat death

of a million potential futures and sent it back in time to make

extra mass to bind the galaxies together. Fellows tells me

that a physicist called Paul Dirac once suggested that the

whole universe might be built out of one particle moving back

and forth in time and space. The Vo‘lach made that true in

part. They ran the universe back on itself to save everyone,

and in the process they fixed for ever a single random future

the prospect of which destroyed them.

Then I came and blew it up. I‘ve ended their work, and

hence, possibly, ended everything, and there‘s more. The

reason why the Vo‘lach could not escape from the future the

Spire showed them wasn‘t that they did not guess the riddle

right: it was that the very existence of the Spire locked that

future into reality. All history had to tend to that future

because light from it was already here, in the past.

Now randomness is seeping under the doors of the

universe, and outside it is cold and dark.

From the moment the Spire ceased to function, the future

began to be affected by quantum drift, by the endless clatter

of the dice that so horrified Einstein, the ultimately

meaningless causality of subatomic events. Without the

Spire‘s relentless time pressure tweaking the universe into

certain preordained paths, every non-causal subatomic event

that happens now points us towards a spread of futures

opening out infinitely in a fractal nightmare. I have planted a

tree that has branches upon branches upon branches.

Everything I do now, every decision I take, every decision

anyone takes now, every drop of sweat that in falling

hesitates between two equally probable paths upon a lover‘s

back splits the world. The future is a grey mist of

probabilities.

Oh, the cosmologists are worried enough, but that will blow

over. The human race isn‘t built to care very much about the

next thousand years, let alone the next billion, and perhaps

that‘s why - unlike the Vo‘lach - we aren‘t extinct. Perhaps

being willing to muck things up for your children is a survival

characteristic. I‘m not really mourning the human race or the

cosmos, but certain real people. You see, the future wasn‘t

unknown to me. I had friends there. Time travellers, future

cops, cosmic hoboes, people met in passing. Ghost ships in

the night.

Now I don‘t know if they still exist. I may have just signed

the death sentence for Chris and the others, for a future of

skycities and Empire, for poverty and glory, for Federations

and peace treaties between galaxies.

Oh shit, I‘m going to...

Extract ends

Clarence stopped in the narrow ship‘s corridor and hesitated

a moment looking unconsciously - yes, he did have an

unconscious now, for his sins - for a distraction. The hum of

the spaceward wail attracted him, but the sign indicating

that the wall had been painted forbade physical investigation.

Oh well. He suspected he was delaying the debriefing

deliberately, and he marvelled at the squeamishness he had

developed in respect of this task. What was it about feelings?

Things had been so much easier when he had been a Ship.

Only animals are squeamish, he said to himself sternly,

only icky, lower animals; not me.

Liar, liar, pants on fire, a still small voice said in the back

of his head.

With a hand whose biology was a lie he pressed the door

sensor of Bernice‘s stateroom. A minute later he was cradling

Bernice‘s head in his arms; oblivious to the vomit clinging to

his bare feet.

Bernice woke with a head that felt like Hitler‘s after a session

chewing a half-rug poisoned by British Intelligence at the

suggestion of a mysterious man with wings.

Clarence was stroking her head and whispering. She

couldn‘t hear the words, but they made her feel safe, and

warm. It was comforting and for a moment she almost let it

wash away the guilt, and then she recognized the words as a

tune her mother had sung to her as a child, and she

wondered how Clarence knew it, and remembered that God

had a simulacrum of her with presumably her memories, all

her weaknesses, all her push-buttons. How many times had

this been tried out mathematically?

‗Let go of me!‘ she snarled, narcotics bitter in her mouth,

wondering how she could ever have contemplated... that is,

could ever have been so stupid as to take tranqs on top of

brandy. What had she been thinking?

Clarence‘s face, incuriously innocent, beamed too near to

hers, and she lashed out backhanded and felt, in that sick

moment, a feather break under her knuckles with the sound

of crystal shattering.

Clarence sighed, and ruffled at a dented wing. ‗You are

assuming that the paradox you created was that which

destroyed the Spire, but it wasn‘t, or at least it wasn‘t

necessarily that paradox that destroyed it. The Spire was

always going to fail somehow. It was a paradox in itself.

Eventually it would have created a past in which dark matter

had penetrated back so far that the universe had always

appeared naturally to be that which the Vo‘lach wished to

create, at which point they would no longer have perceived a

need to build a Spire to make it so. So they would not, so it

would not, so they would, so it would, for ever round and

round until somewhen, some random change destroyed the

cycle collapsing it into a logical causal series, just as your

smaller paradox collapsed. The universe was already within a

massive time paradox, and the smaller paradox you assisted

to create merely floated out and popped it. Soap bubbles

within soap bubbles, I assure you. As for the future and all

its inhabitants, I think you‘ll find they are much as they were

always going to have been.‘ Clarence blinked. ‗I hope the

tenses in that sentence work out.‘

‗It wasn‘t me,‘ Bernice said slowly.

Then, ‗They‘re not dead,‘ she shouted. Then she followed it

up with a pillow hard to the angel‘s face. She did not say,

‗Where the hell were you when I was thinking of what I‘m

never going to admit I was thinking of?‘ She did not have to

say it.

Later when she was calmer, Bernice asked for the text of her

book. Clarence realized that it was this he had been

dreading.

‗I suppose you‘ll put it straight in the recycler,‘ he said

hopefully as he handed it over from the glowing space in the

air where it had been hidden. ‗I mean, you‘ll want to do the

work yourself, really, won‘t you?*

He felt that he must look really shifty again.

‗Don‘t you know?‘ Bernice asked sardonically. ‗Isn‘t my

every action transparent to God?‘

She flipped the sheath of pages.

Most of them were blank, apart from a section on galactic

myths and a Post-it note that read ‗too few Martians‘. It

fluttered to the floor like a yellow butterfly.

Clarence blushed and, strangely, felt it not at all

unShiplike to do so.

‗I, ehm, did say that it was a perfect simulacrum, didn‘t I?

So, well, er, naturally it only wrote as much as you did.‘

Bernice glared at him. ‗So what on Earth made you offer its

work to me as payment. You realize I could sue for breach of

contract.‘ A smile was creeping around her face.

Clarence was fidgeting wildly with his feathers.

‗We, er, tested out offering it as payment, using a second

simulacrum. Erm, it refused point blank to accept the book

but insisted on taking the assignment anyway out of

stubbornness. God was convinced you would do the same. It

was quite a shock when you agreed.‘

‗You mean I wasn‘t predictable?‘

‗Well, I suppose if God had emulated a statistically valid

sample of Bernice simulacrums then the probability of your

actions could be determined from them, but on a one-to-one

ratio, no you‘re not.‘

‗Marvellous,‘ Bernice muttered. There was sarcasm there,

but there was, Clarence thought, satisfaction as well. He

wondered if she suspected that God had picked her

deliberately to collapse the Vo‘lach paradox because alone of

its possible agents she had the requisite experience of time

travel. He wondered if she suspected that God had chosen

the time at which the bubble should be burst to ensure the

best possible future for the People. He wondered if there were

a billion, or a billion billion, universes in which he had

opened the door and found Bernice dead. He decided it did

not matter. This Bernice was alive.

The future was alive.

Document Outline

Front Cover

Back Cover

PROLOGUE

1 ANGELS IN DIRTY PLACES

2 MURDER MUST ADVERTISE

3 DARK AND STORMY LIGHT

INTERLUDE

4 COMMERCE AND VISITATIONS

5 IN SEARCH OF ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS

6 SAILING TO BIZARRUM

7 I AM THE ASSASSIN

8 DOCTOR AT LARGE

9 HIGH DUNGEON

10 YOU CAN’T BE TOO CAREFUL WITH LIFE

INTERLUDE

11 NOSTRADAMUS WAS RIGHT

12 TURING TESTS

13 THE NUCLEAR WAY TO UNIVERSAL PEACE AND BROTHERHOOD

14 MYSTERY UNDER THE SEA

15 AH HA!

16 WHEN I SAY RUN, RUN LIKE RABBITS

17 UP, UP AND AWAY!

18 THERE WAS DEATH FROM THE BEGINNING TO THE END OF TIME

19 COVER STORIES

20 KILL THE DOG ON SUNDAY

INTERLUDE

EPILOGUE