Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days, Page 2

  “The old place hasn’t changed much,” Childe said, swooping us through a dense conglomeration of golden buildings, as extravagantly tiered as the dream pagodas of a fever-racked Emperor.

  “Then you’ve really been away? When you told me you’d faked your death, I wondered if you’d just gone into hiding.”

  He answered with a trace of hesitation, “I’ve been away, but not as far as you’d think. A family matter came up that was best dealt with confidentially, and I really couldn’t be bothered explaining to everyone why I needed some peace and quiet on my own.”

  “And faking your death was the best way to go about it?”

  “Like I said, I couldn’t have planned the Eighty if I’d tried. I had to bribe a lot of minor players in the project, of course, and I’ll spare you the details of how we provided a corpse . . . but it all worked swimmingly, didn’t it?”

  “I never had any doubts that you’d died along with the rest of them.”

  “I didn’t like deceiving my friends. But I couldn’t go to all that trouble and then ruin my plan with a few indiscretions.”

  “You were friends, then?” solicited Trintignant.

  “Yes, Doctor,” Childe said, glancing back at him. “Way back when. Richard and I were rich kids—relatively rich, anyway—with not enough to do. Neither of us were interested in the stock market or the social whirl. We were only interested in games.”

  “Oh. How charming. What kinds of games, might I ask?”

  “We’d build simulations to test each other—extraordinarily elaborate worlds filled with subtle dangers and temptations. Mazes and labyrinths; secret passages; trapdoors; dungeons and dragons. We’d spend months inside them, driving each other crazy. Then we’d go away and make them even harder.”

  “But in due course you grew apart,” the Doctor said. His synthesised voice had a curious piping quality.

  “Yeah,” Childe said. “But we never stopped being friends. It was just that Richard had spent so much time devising increasingly alien scenarios that he’d become more interested in the implied psychologies behind the tests. And I’d become interested only in the playing of the games; not their construction. Unfortunately Richard was no longer there to provide challenges for me.”

  “You were always much better than me at playing them,” I said. “In the end it got too hard to come up with something you’d find difficult. You knew the way my mind worked too well.”

  “He’s convinced that he’s a failure,” Childe said, turning round to smile at the Doctor.

  “As are we all,” Trintignant answered. “And with some justification, it must be said. I have never been allowed to pursue my admittedly controversial interests to their logical ends. You, Mister Swift, were shunned by those who you felt should have recognised your worth in the field of speculative alien psychology. And you, Mister Childe, have never discovered a challenge worthy of your undoubted talents.”

  “I didn’t think you’d paid me any attention, Doctor.”

  “Nor had I. I have surmised this much since our meeting.”

  The volantor dropped below ground level, descending into a brightly lit commercial plaza lined with shops and boutiques. With insouciant ease, Childe skimmed us between aerial walkways and then nosed the car into a dark side-tunnel. He gunned the machine faster, our speed indicated only by the passing of red lights set into the tunnel sides. Now and then another vehicle passed us, but once the tunnel had branched and rebranched half a dozen times, no further traffic appeared. The tunnel lights were gone now and when the volantor’s headlights grazed the walls they revealed ugly cracks and huge, scarred absences of cladding. These old sub-surface ducts dated back to the city’s earliest days, before the domes were thrown across the crater.

  Even if I had recognised the part of the city where we had entered the tunnel system, I would have been hopelessly lost by now.

  “Do you think Childe has brought us together to taunt us about our lack of respective failures, Doctor?” I asked, beginning to feel uneasy again despite my earlier attempts at reassurance.

  “I would consider that a distinct possibility, were Childe himself not conspicuously tainted by the same lack of success.”

  “Then there must be another reason.”

  “Which I’ll reveal in due course,” Childe said. “Just bear with me, will you? You two aren’t the only ones I’ve gathered together.”

  Presently we arrived somewhere.

  It was a cave in the form of a near-perfect hemisphere, the great domed roof arching a clear three hundred metres from the floor. We were obviously well below Yellowstone’s surface now. It was even possible that we had passed beyond the city’s crater wall, so that above us lay only poisonous skies.

  But the domed chamber was inhabited.

  The roof was studded with an enormous number of lamps, flooding the interior with synthetic daylight. An island stood in the middle of the chamber, moated by a ring of uninviting water. A single bone-white bridge connected the mainland to the island, shaped like a great curved femur. The island was dominated by a thicket of slender, dark poplars partly concealing a pale structure situated near its middle.

  Childe brought the volantor to a rest near the edge of the water and invited us to disembark.

  “Where are we?” I asked, once I had stepped down.

  “Query the city and find out for yourself,” Trintignant said.

  The result was not what I was expecting. For a moment there was a shocking absence inside my head, the neural equivalent of a sudden, unexpected amputation.

  The Doctor’s chuckle was an arpeggio played on a pipe organ. “We have been out of range of city services from the moment we entered his conveyance.”

  “You needn’t worry,” Childe said. “You are beyond city services, but only because I value the secrecy of this place. If I imagined it’d have come as a shock to you, I’d have told you already.”

  “I’d have at least appreciated a warning, Roland,” I said.

  “Would it have changed your mind about coming here?”

  “Conceivably.”

  The echo of his laughter betrayed the chamber’s peculiar acoustics. “Then are you at all surprised that I didn’t tell you?”

  I turned to Trintignant. “What about you?”

  “I confess my use of city services has been as limited as your own, but for rather different reasons.”

  “The good Doctor needed to lie low,” Childe said. “That meant he couldn’t participate very actively in city affairs. Not if he didn’t want to be tracked down and assassinated.”

  I stamped my feet, beginning to feel cold. “Good. What now?”

  “It’s only a short ride to the house,” Childe said, glancing towards the island.

  Now a noise came steadily nearer. It was an antiquated, rumbling sound, accompanied by a odd, rhythmic sort of drumming, quite unlike any machine I had experienced. I looked towards the femoral bridge, suspecting as I did that it was exactly what it looked like: a giant, bio-engineered bone, carved with a flat roadbed. And something was approaching us over the span: a dark, complicated and unfamiliar contraption, which at first glance resembled an iron tarantula.

  I felt the back of my neck prickle.

  The thing reached the end of the bridge and swerved towards us. Two mechanical black horses provided the motive power. They were emaciated black machines with sinewy, piston-driven limbs, venting steam and snorting from intakes. Malignant red laser-eyes swept over us. The horses were harnessed to a four-wheeled carriage slightly larger than the volantor, above which was perched a headless humanoid robot. Skeletal hands gripped iron control cables which plunged into the backs of the horses’ steel necks.

  “Meant to inspire confidence, is it?” I asked.

  “It’s an old family heirloom,” Childe said, swinging open a black door in the side of the carriage. “My uncle Giles made automata. Unfortunately—for reasons we’ll come to—he was a bit of a miserable bastard. But don’t let it pu
t you off.”

  He helped us aboard, then climbed inside himself, sealed the door and knocked on the roof. I heard the mechanical horses snort; alloy hooves hammered the ground impatiently. Then we were moving, curving around and ascending the gentle arc of the bridge of bone.

  “Have you been here during the entire period of your absence, Mister Childe?” Trintignant asked.

  He nodded. “Ever since that family business came up, I’ve allowed myself the occasional visit back to the city—just like I did today—but I’ve tried to keep such excursions to a minimum.”

  “Didn’t you have horns the last time we met?” I said.

  He rubbed the smooth skin of his scalp where the horns had been. “Had to have them removed. I couldn’t very well disguise myself otherwise.”

  We crossed the bridge and navigated a path between the tall trees which sheltered the island’s structure. Childe’s carriage pulled up to a smart stop in front of the building and I was afforded my first unobstructed view of our destination. It was not one to induce great cheer. The house’s architecture was haphazard: whatever basic symmetry it might once have had was lost under a profusion of additions and modifications. The roof was a jumbled collision of angles and spires, jutting turrets and sinister oubliettes. Not all of the embellishments had been arranged at strict right angles to their neighbours, and the style and apparent age of the house varied jarringly from place to place. Since our arrival in the cave the overhead lights had dimmed, simulating the onset of dusk, but only a few windows were illuminated, clustered together in the left-hand wing. The rest of the house had a forbidding aspect, the paleness of its stone, the irregularity of its construction and the darkness of its many windows suggesting a pile of skulls.

  Almost before we had disembarked from the carriage, a reception party emerged from the house. It was a troupe of servitors—humanoid household robots, of the kind anyone would have felt comfortable with in the city proper—but they had been reworked to resemble skeletal ghouls or headless knights. Their mechanisms had been sabotaged so that they limped and creaked, and they had all had their voiceboxes disabled.

  “Had a lot of time on his hands, your uncle,” I said.

  “You’d have loved Giles, Richard. He was a scream.”

  “I’ll take your word for it, I think.”

  The servitors escorted us into the central part of the house, then took us through a maze of chill, dark corridors.

  Finally we reached a large room walled in plush red velvet. A holoclavier sat in one corner, with a book of sheet music spread open above the projected keyboard. There was a malachite escritoire, a number of well-stocked bookcases, a single chandelier, three smaller candelabra and two fireplaces of distinctly gothic appearance, in one of which roared an actual fire. But the room’s central feature was a mahogany table, around which three additional guests were gathered.

  “Sorry to keep everyone waiting,” Childe said, closing a pair of sturdy wooden doors behind us. “Now. Introductions.”

  The others looked at us with no more than mild interest.

  The only man amongst them wore an elaborately ornamented exoskeleton: a baroque support structure of struts, hinged plates, cables and servo-mechanisms. His face was a skull papered with deathly white skin, shading to black under his bladelike cheekbones. His eyes were concealed behind goggles, his hair a spray of stiff black dreadlocks.

  Periodically he inhaled from a glass pipe, connected to a miniature refinery of bubbling apparatus placed before him on the table.

  “Allow me to introduce Captain Forqueray,” Childe said. “Captain—this is Richard Swift and . . . um, Doctor Trintignant.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said, leaning across the table to shake Forqueray’s hand. His grip felt like the cold clasp of a squid.

  “The Captain is an Ultra; the master of the lighthugger Apollyon, currently in orbit around Yellowstone,” Childe added.

  Trintignant refrained from approaching him.

  “Shy, Doctor?” Forqueray said, his voice simultaneously deep and flawed, like a cracked bell.

  “No, merely cautious. It is a matter of common knowledge that I have enemies amongst the Ultras.”

  Trintignant removed his Homburg and patted his crown delicately, as if smoothing down errant hairs. Silver waves had been sculpted into his head-mask, so that he resembled a bewigged Regency fop dipped in mercury.

  “You’ve enemies everywhere,” said Forqueray between gurgling inhalations. “But I bear you no personal animosity for your atrocities, and I guarantee that my crew will extend you the same courtesy.”

  “Very gracious of you,” Trintignant said, before shaking the Ultra’s hand for the minimum time compatible with politeness. “But why should your crew concern me?”

  “Never mind that.” It was one of the two women speaking now. “Who is this guy, and why does everyone hate him?”

  “Allow me to introduce Hirz,” Childe said, indicating the woman who had spoken. She was small enough to have been a child, except that her face was clearly that of an adult woman. She was dressed in austere, tight-fitting black clothes which only emphasised her diminutive build. “Hirz is—for want of a better word—a mercenary.”

  “Except I prefer to think of myself as an information retrieval specialist. I specialise in clandestine infiltration for high-level corporate clients in the Glitter Band—physical espionage, some of the time. Mostly, though, I’m what used to be called a hacker. I’m also pretty damned good at my job.” Hirz paused to swig down some wine. “But enough about me. Who’s the silver dude, and what did Forqueray mean about atrocities?”

  “You’re seriously telling me you’re unaware of Trintignant’s reputation?” I said.

  “Hey, listen. I get myself frozen between assignments. That means I miss a lot of shit that goes down in Chasm City. Get over it.”

  I shrugged and—with one eye on the Doctor himself—told Hirz what I knew about Trintignant. I sketched in his early career as an experimental cyberneticist, how his reputation for fearless innovation had eventually brought him to Calvin Sylveste’s attention.

  Calvin had recruited Trintignant to his own research team, but the collaboration had not been a happy one. Trintignant’s desire to find the ultimate fusion of flesh and machine had become obsessive; even—some said—perverse. After a scandal involving experimentation on unconsenting subjects, Trintignant had been forced to pursue his work alone, his methods too extreme even for Calvin.

  So Trintignant had gone to ground, and continued his gruesome experiments with his only remaining subject.

  Himself.

  “So let’s see,” said the final guest. “Who have we got? An obsessive and thwarted cyberneticist with a taste for extreme modification. An intrusion specialist with a talent for breaking into highly protected—and dangerous—environments. A man with a starship at his disposal and the crew to operate it.”

  Then she looked at Childe, and while her gaze was averted I admired the fine, faintly familiar profile of her face. Her long hair was the sheer black of interstellar space, pinned back from her face by a jewelled clasp which flickered with a constellation of embedded pastel lights. Who was she? I felt sure we had met once or maybe twice before. Perhaps we had passed each other amongst the shrines in the Monument to the Eighty, visiting the dead.

  “And Childe,” she continued. “A man once known for his love of intricate challenges, but long assumed dead.” Then she turned her piercing eyes upon me. “And, finally, you.”

  “I know you, I think—” I said, her name on the tip of my tongue.

  “Of course you do.” Her look, suddenly, was contemptuous. “I’m Celestine. You used to be married to me.”

  All along, Childe had known she was here.

  “Do you mind if I ask what this is about?” I said, doing my best to sound as reasonable as possible, rather than someone on the verge of losing their temper in polite company.

  Celestine withdrew her hand once I had shaken
it. “Roland invited me here, Richard. Just the same way he did you, with the same veiled hints about having found something.”

  “But you’re . . .”

  “Your ex-wife?” She nodded. “Exactly how much do you remember, Richard? I heard the strangest rumours, you know. That you’d had me deleted from your long-term memory.”

  “I had you suppressed, not deleted. There’s a subtle distinction.”

  She nodded knowingly. “So I gather.”

  I looked at the other guests, who were observing us. Even Forqueray was waiting, the pipe of his apparatus poised an inch from his mouth in expectation. They were waiting for me to say something; anything.

  “Why exactly are you here, Celestine?”

  “You don’t remember, do you?”

  “Remember what?”

  “What it was I used to do, Richard, when we were married.”

  “I confess I don’t, no.”

  Childe coughed. “Your wife, Richard, was as fascinated by the alien as you were. She was one of the city’s foremost specialists on the Pattern Jugglers, although she’d be entirely too modest to admit it herself.” He paused, apparently seeking Celestine’s permission to continue. “She visited them, long before you met, spending several years of her life at the study station on Spindrift. You swam with the Jugglers, didn’t you, Celestine?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “And allowed them to reshape your mind, transforming its neural pathways into something deeply—albeit usually temporarily—alien.”

  “It wasn’t that big a deal,” Celestine said.

  “Not if you’d been fortunate enough to have it happen to you, no. But for someone like Richard—who craved knowledge of the alien with every fibre of his existence—it would have been anything but mundane.” He turned to me. “Isn’t that true?”

  “I admit I’d have done a great deal to experience communion with the Jugglers,” I said, knowing that it was pointless to deny it. “But it just wasn’t possible. My family lacked the resources to send me to one of the Juggler worlds, and the bodies that might ordinarily have funded that kind of trip—the Sylveste Institute, for instance—had turned their attentions elsewhere.”