Chapter THIRTY-ONE
It was like delirium.
I remember reading somewhere that when the archaeologues on Mars first got into the buried mausoleum spaces they later categorised as cities, a fair percentage of them went insane. Mental collapse was an occupational hazard of the profession back then. Some of the finest minds of the century were sacrificed in pursuit of the keys to Martian civilisation. Not broken and dragged down to raving insanity the way the archetypal antiheroes of experia horror flicks always end up. Not broken, just blunted. Worn down from the sharp edge of intellectual prowess to a slightly numb, slightly blurred distracted vagueness. They went that way in their dozens. Psychically abraded by the constant contact with the leavings of unhuman minds. The Guild spent them like surgical blades rammed against a spinning grindstone.
“Well, I suppose if you can fly…” said Luc Deprez, eyeing the architecture ahead without enthusiasm.
His stance telegraphed irritated confusion. I guessed he was having the same problem locking down potential ambush corners that I was. When the combat conditioning goes in that deep, not being able to do what they’ve trained you to itches like quitting nicotine. And spotting an ambush in Martian architecture would have to be like trying to catch a Mitcham’s Point slictopus with your bare hands.
From the ponderously overhanging lintel that led out of the docking bay, the internal structure of the ship burst up and around us like nothing I had ever seen. Groping after comparison, my mind came up with an image from my Newpest childhood. One spring out on the Deeps side of Hirata’s Reef, I’d given myself a bad scare when the feed tube on my scrounged and patched scuba suit snagged on an outcrop of coral fifteen metres down. Watching oxygen explode out through the rupture in a riot of silver-bellied corpuscles, I’d wondered fleetingly what the storm of bubbles must look like from the inside.
Now I knew.
These bubbles were frozen in place, tinged mother-of-pearl shades of blue and pink where indistinct low-light sources glowed under their surfaces, but aside from that basic difference in longevity, they were as chaotic as my escaping air supply had been that day. There appeared to be no architectural rhyme or reason to the way they joined and merged into each other. In places the link was a hole only metres across. Elsewhere the curving walls simply broke their sweep as they met an intersecting circumference. At no point in the first space we entered was the ceiling less than twenty metres overhead.
“The floor’s flat though,” murmured Sun Liping, kneeling to brush at the sheened surface underfoot. “And they had—have—grav generators.”
“Origin of species.” Tanya Wardani’s voice boomed slightly in the cathedric emptiness. “They evolved in a gravity well, just like us. Zero g isn’t healthy long-term, no matter how much fun it is. And if you have gravity, you need flat surfaces to put things down on. Practicality at work. Same as the docking bay back there. All very well wanting to stretch your wings, but you need straight lines to land a spaceship.”
We all glanced back at the gap we’d come through. Compared to where we stood now, the alien curvatures of the docking station had been practically demure. Long, stepped walls tapered outward like two-metre-fat sleeping serpents stretched out and laid not quite directly on top of each other. The coils wove just barely off a straight axis, as if even within the strictures of the docking station’s purpose, the Martian shipwrights had not quite been able to restrain themselves from an organic flourish. There was no danger involved in bringing a docking vessel down through the increasing levels of atmospheric density held in by some mechanism in the stepped walls, but looking out to the sides, you still felt you were being lowered into the belly of something sleeping.
Delirium.
I could feel it brushing lightly at the upper extremities of my vision, sucking gently at my eyeballs and leaving me with a faintly swollen feeling behind the brow. A little like the cut-rate virtualities you used to get in arcades back when I was a kid, the ones where the construct wouldn’t let your character look up more than a few degrees above the horizontal, even when that was where the next stage of the game was taking you. It was the same feeling here, the promise of a dull ache behind the eyes from constantly trying to see what was up there. An awareness of space overhead that you kept wanting to check on.
The curve on the gleaming surfaces around us put a tilt on it all, a vague sense that you were about to topple over sideways and that, in fact, toppled over and lying down might be the best stance to take in this gratingly alien environment. That this whole ridiculous structure was eggshell thin and ready to crack apart if you did the wrong thing, and that it might easily spill you out into the void.
Delirium.
Better get used to it.
The chamber was not empty. Skeletal arrangements of what looked like scaffolding loomed on the edges of the level floor space. I recalled holoshot images in a download I’d scanned as a child, Martian roosting bars, complete with virtually generated Martians roosting on them. Here, somehow, the emptiness of the bars gave each structure an eerie gauntness that did nothing for the creeping unease on the nape of my neck.
“They’ve been folded down,” murmured Wardani, staring upward. She looked puzzled.
At the lower curves of the bubble wall, machines whose functions I couldn’t even guess at stood beneath the—apparently—tidied-away roost bars. Most of them looked spiny and aggressive, but when the archaeologue brushed past one, it did nothing more than mutter to itself and pettishly rearrange some of its spines.
Plastic rattle and swift scaling whine—armament deployed in every pair of hands across the hollow bell of the chamber.
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Wardani barely spared us a backward glance. “Loosen up, will you. It’s asleep. It’s a machine.”
I put up the Kalashnikovs and shrugged. Across the chamber Deprez caught my eye, and grinned.
“A machine for what?” Hand wanted to know.
This time the archaeologue did look round.
“I don’t know,” she said tiredly. “Give me a couple of days and a fully equipped lab team, maybe I could tell you. Right now, all I can tell you is that it’s dormant.”
Sutjiadi took a couple of steps closer, Sunjet still raised. “How can you tell that?”
“Because if it wasn’t, we’d already be dealing with it on an interactive basis, believe me. Plus, can you see anybody with wingspurs rising a metre above their shoulders putting an active machine that close to a curved wall? I’m telling you, this whole place is powered down and packed up.”
“Mistress Wardani appears to be correct,” said Sun, pivoting about with the Nuhanovic survey set on her forearm raised. “There is detectable circuitry in the walls, but most of it is inactive.”
“There must be something running all this.” Ameli Vongsavath stood with her hands in her pocket and stared up into the draughty heights at the centre of the chamber. “We have breathable air. A bit thin, but it’s warm. Come to that, this whole place has to be heated somehow.”
“Caretaker systems.” Tanya Wardani seemed to have lost interest in the machines. She wandered back to the group. “A lot of the deeper buried cities on Mars and Nkrumah’s Land had them too.”
“After this long?” Sutjiadi didn’t sound happy.
Wardani sighed. She jerked a thumb at the docking bay entrance. “It’s not witchcraft, captain. You’ve got the same thing running the Nagini for us back there. If we all die, she’ll sit there for a good few centuries waiting for someone to come back.”
“Yes, and if it’s someone who doesn’t have the codes, she’ll blast them into soup. That doesn’t reassure me, Mistress Wardani.”
“Well maybe that’s the difference between us and the Martians. A little civilised sophistication.”
“And longer lasting batteries,” I said. “This has all been here a lot longer than the Nagini’s good for.”
“What’s the radio-transparency like?” asked Hand.
Sun did something to the Nuhanovic system she was wearing. The bulkier shoulder-mounted sections of the survey equipment flickered. Symbols evolved in the air over the back of her hand. She shrugged. “It’s not very good. I’m barely picking up the Nagini’s navigational beacon, and she’s only on the other side of the wall. Shielding, I suppose. We are in a docking station, and close to the hull. I think we will need to move further in.”
I spotted a couple of alarmed glances flicker back and forth amongst the group. Deprez caught me watching and he smiled a little.
“So who wants to explore?” he asked softly.
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” said Hand.
I moved out from the instinctive defence huddle we’d all formed, stepped through the gap between two roost bars and reached up to the lip of the opening above and behind. Waves of tiredness and faint nausea shimmered through me as I hauled myself up, but by now I was expecting it and the neurachem locked it down.
The hollow beyond was empty. Not even dust.
“Maybe it’s not such a good idea,” I agreed, dropping back. “But how many human beings this side of the next millennium are going to get this chance? You need ten hours, right, Sun?”
“At the most.”
“And you reckon you can build us a decent map on that thing?” I gestured at the Nuhanovic set.
“Very probably. This is the best survey software money can buy.” She bowed briefly in Hand’s direction. “Nuhanovic smart systems. They don’t build it better than this.”
I looked over to Ameli Vongsavath.
“And the Nagini’s weapon systems are powered up solid.”
The pilot nodded. “Parameters I gave, she could stand off a full tactical assault with no help from us.”
“Well, then I’d say we’ve got a day-pass to the Coral Castle.” I glanced at Sutjiadi. “Those of us that want it, that is.”
Looking around, I saw the idea taking hold. Deprez was already there, face and stance betraying his curiosity, but it was slowly filling up the rest of them too. Everywhere, heads were tilted back to take in the alien architecture, features ironed soft by wonder. Even Sutjiadi couldn’t hold it off completely. The grim watchfulness he’d maintained since we breached the upper levels of the docking chamber’s layered atmosphere field was melting into something less clamped down. The fear of the unknown was ebbing, cancelled out by something stronger and older.
Monkey curiosity. The trait I’d disparaged to Wardani when we arrived on the beach at Sauberville. The scampering, chittering jungle intelligence that would cheerfully scale the brooding figures of ancient stone idols and poke fingers into the staring eyesockets just to see. The bright obsidian desire to know. The thing that’s dragged us out here, all the way from the grasslands of central Africa. The thing that one day’ll probably put us somewhere so far out that we’ll get there ahead of the sunlight from those central African days.
Hand stepped into the centre, poised in executive mode.
“Let’s achieve some sense of priority here,” he said carefully. “I sympathise with any wish you may all have to see some of this vessel—I would like to see it myself—but our major concern is to find a safe transmission base for the buoy. That we must do before anything else, and I suggest we do it as a single unit.” He turned to Sutjiadi. “After that, we can detail exploratory parties. Captain?”
Sutjiadi nodded, but it was an uncharacteristically vague motion. Like the rest of us, he wasn’t really paying attention at human frequencies any more.
If there’d been any lingering doubts about the Martian vessel’s hulk status, a couple of hours in the frozen bubbles of its architecture was enough to cancel them out. We walked for over a kilometre, winding back and forth through the apparently random connections between chambers. In places the openings were more or less at floor level, but elsewhere they were cut high enough that Wardani or Sun had to power up the grav harnesses they were wearing and float up to peer through. Jiang and Deprez took point together, splitting and edging up to the entrance to each new chamber with quiet, symmetrical lethality.
We found nothing recognisably living.
The machines we came across ignored us, and no one seemed inclined to get close enough to elicit more of a reaction.
Increasingly, as we moved deeper into the body of the ship, we began to find structures that might by a stretch of the imagination be called corridors—long, bulbous spaces with egg-shaped entrances let in at either end. It looked like the same construction technique as the standard bubble chamber, modified to suit.
“You know what this whole thing is,” I told Wardani, while we waited for Sun to scout out another overhead opening. “It’s like aerogel. Like they built a basic framework and then just,”—I shook my head. The concept stubbornly resisted chiselling out into words—“I don’t know, just blew up a few cubic kilometres of heavy-duty aerogel base all over it, and then waited for it to harden.”
Wardani smiled wanly. “Yeah, maybe. Something like that. That would put their plasticity science a little ahead of ours, wouldn’t it. To be able to map and model foam data on this scale.”
“Maybe not.” I groped at the opening shape of the idea, feeling at its origami edges. “Out here specific structure wouldn’t matter. Whatever came out would do. And then you just fill the space with whatever you need. Drivers, environmental systems, you know, weapons…”
“Weapons?” She looked at me with something unreadable in her face. “Does this have to be a warship?”
“No, it was an example. But—”
“Something in here,” said Sun over the comset. “Some kind of tree or—”
What happened next was hard to explain.
I heard the sound coming.
I knew with utter certainty that I was going to hear it fractions of a second before the low chime floated down out of the bubble Sun was exploring. The knowledge was a solid sensation, heard like an echo cast backward against the slow decay of passing time. If it was the Envoy intuition, it was working at a level of efficiency I’d only previously run into in dreams.
“Songspire,” said Wardani.
I listened to the echoes fade, inverting the shiver of premonition I’d just felt, and suddenly wanted very much to be back on the other side of the gate, facing the mundane dangers of the nanobe systems and the fallout from murdered Sauberville.
Cherries and mustard. An inexplicable tangle of scents spilling down in the wake of the sound. Jiang raised his Sunjet.
Sutjiadi’s normally immobile features creased.
“What is that?”
“Songspire,” I said, spinning matter-of-factness around my own creeping unease. “Kind of Martian houseplant.”
I’d seen one once, for real, on Earth. Dug out of the Martian bedrock it had grown from over the previous several thousand years and plinthed as a rich man’s objet d’art. Still singing when anything touched it, even the breeze, still giving out the cherry-and-mustard aroma. Not dead, not alive, not anything that could be categorised into a box by human science.
“How is it attached?” Wardani wanted to know.
“Growing out of the wall,” Sun’s voice came back dented with a by now familiar wonder. “Like some kind of coral…”
Wardani stepped back to give herself launch space and reached for the drives on her own grav harness. The quick whine of power-up stung the air.
“I’m coming up.”
“Just a moment, Mistress Wardani,” Hand glided in to crowd her. “Sun, is there a way through up there?”
“No. Whole bubble’s closed.”
“Then come back down.” He raised a hand to forestall Wardani. “We do not have time for this. Later, if you wish, you may come back while Sun is repairing the buoy. For now, we must find a safe transmission base before anything else.”
A vaguely mutinous expression broke across the archaeologue’s face, but she was too tired to sustain it. She knocked out the grav drivers again—downwhining machine disappointment—and turned away, something muttered and bitten off drifting back over her shoulder, almost as faint as the cherries and mustard from above. She stalked a line away from the Mandrake exec towards the exit. Jiang hesitated a moment in her path, then let her by.
I sighed.
“Nice going, Hand. She’s the closest thing we’ve got to a native guide in this.” I gestured around. “Place, and you want to piss her off. They teach you that while you were getting your conflict investment doctorate? Upset the experts if you possibly can?”
“No,” he said evenly. “But they taught me not to waste time.”
“Right.” I went after Wardani and caught up just inside the corridor leading out of the chamber. “Hey, hold up. Wardani. Wardani, just chill out, will you. Man’s an a*shole, what are you going to do?”
“F*cking merchant.”
“Well, yeah. That too. But he is the reason we’re here in the first place. Should never underestimate that mercantile drive.”
“What are you, a f*cking economics philosopher now?”
“I’m.” I stopped. “Listen.”
“No, I’m through with—”
“No, listen.” I held up a hand and pointed down the corridor. “There. Hear that?”
“I don’t hear…” Her voice trailed off as she caught it. By then, the Carrera’s Wedge neurachem had reeled in the sound for me, so clear there could be no question.
Somewhere down the corridor, something was singing.
Two chambers further on, we found them. A whole bonsai songspire forest, sprouting across the floor and up the lower curve of a corridor neck where it joined the main bubble. The spires seemed to have broken through the primary structure of the vessel from the floor around the join, although there was no sign of damage at their roots. It was as if the hull material had closed around them like healing tissue. The nearest machine was a respectful ten metres off, huddled down the corridor.
The song the spires emitted was closest to the sound of a violin, but played with the infinitely slow drag of individual monofilaments across the bridge and to no melody that I could discern. It was a sound down at the lowest levels of hearing, but each time it swelled, I felt something tugging at the pit of my stomach.
“The air,” said Wardani quietly. She had raced me along the bulbous corridors and through the bubble chambers, and now she crouched in front of the spires, out of breath but shiny eyed. “There must be convection through here from another level. They only sing on surface contact.”
I shook off an unlooked-for shiver.
“How old do you reckon they are?”
“Who knows?” She got to her feet again. “If this was a planetary grav field, I’d say a couple of thousand years at most. But it isn’t.” She took a step back and shook her head, hand cupping her chin, fingers pressed over her mouth as if to keep in a too-hasty comment. I waited. Finally the hand came away from her face and gestured, hesitant. “Look at the branching pattern. They don’t. They don’t usually grow like this. Not this twisted.”
I followed her pointing finger. The tallest of the spires stood about chest high, spindly reddish black stone limbs snaking out of the central trunk in a profusion that did seem more exuberant and intricate than the growth I’d seen on the plinthed specimen back on earth. Surrounding it, other, smaller spires emulated the pattern, except that—
The rest of the party caught up, Deprez and Hand in the van.
“Where the hell have you. Oh.”
The faint singing from the spires crept up an almost imperceptible increment. Air currents stirred by the movement of bodies across the chamber. I felt a slight dryness in my throat at the sound it made.
“I’m just looking at these, if that’s OK, Hand.”
“Mistress Wardani—”
I shot the exec a warning glance.
Deprez came up beside the archaeologue. “Are they dangerous?”
“I don’t know. Ordinarily, no, but—”
The thing that had been scratching for attention at the threshold of my consciousness suddenly emerged.
“They’re growing towards each other. Look at the branches on the smaller ones. They all reach up and out. The taller ones branch in all directions.”
“That suggests communication of some sort. An integrated, self relating system.” Sun walked round the cluster of spires, scanning with title emissions tracer on her arm. “Though, hmm.”
“You won’t find any radiation,” said Wardani, almost dreamily. “They suck it in like sponges. Total absorption of everything except red wave light. According to mineral composition, the surface of these things shouldn’t be red at all. They ought to reflect right across the spectrum.”
“But they don’t.” Hand made it sound as if he was thinking of having the spires detained for the transgression. “Why is that, Mistress Wardani?”
“If I knew that, I’d be a Guild President by now. We know less about songspires than practically any other aspect of the Martian biosphere. In fact, we don’t even know if you can rank them in the biosphere.”
“They grow, don’t they?”
I saw Wardani sneer. “So do crystals. That doesn’t make them alive.”
“I don’t know about the rest of you,” said Ameli Vongsavath, skirting the songspires with her Sunjet cocked at a semi-aggressive angle. “But this looks to me like an infestation.”
“Or art,” murmured Deprez. “How would we know?”
Vongsavath shook her head. “This is a ship, Luc. You don’t put your corridor art where you’ll trip over it every time you walk through. Look at these things. They’re all over the place.”
“And if you can fly through?”
“They’d still get in the way.”
“Collision Art,” suggested Schneider with a smirk.
“Alright, that’s enough.” Hand waved himself some space between the spires and their new audience. Faint notes awoke as the motion brushed air currents against the red stone branches. The musk in the air thickened. “We do not have—”
“Time for this,” droned Wardani. “We must find a safe transmission base.”
Schneider guffawed. I bit back a grin and avoided looking in Deprez’s direction. I suspected that Hand’s control was crumbling and I wasn’t keen to push him over the edge at this point. I still wasn’t sure what he’d do when he snapped.
“Sun,” the Mandrake exec’s voice came out even enough. “Check the upper openings.”
The systems specialist nodded and powered up her grav harness. The whine of the drivers cut in and then deepened as her bootsoles unstuck from the floor and she drifted upwards. Jiang and Deprez circled out, Sunjets raised to cover her.
“No way through here,” she called back down from the first opening.
I heard the change, and my eyes slanted back to the songspires. Wardani was the only one watching me and she saw my face. Behind Hand’s back, her mouth opened in a silent question. I nodded at the spires and cupped my ear.
Listen.
Wardani moved closer, then shook her head.
Hissing. “That’s not poss—”
But it was.
The faint, violin-scraped sound of the song was modulating. Reacting to the constant underpinning drone of the grav drivers. That, or maybe the grav field itself. Modulating and, very faintly, strengthening.
Waking up.