and quavery — almost womanly — but never anything other than infinitely patient. ‘Remember, Sky, that when the Flotilla left Earth’s system — left the orbit of Mercury, and flew into interstellar space — the Flotilla was leaving from a system that was still technically engaged in war. Oh, most of the hostilities had ceased by then, but the terms of ceasefire had still not been completely thrashed out, and everyone was still very much on a war footing; ready to return to the fray at a moment’s notice. There were many factions who saw the closing stages of the war as their last chance to make a difference. Some of them, by this time, were little more than highly organised brigands. The Chimerics — or more precisely, the Chimeric faction that created the dolphins — were certainly one of those. The Chimerics in general had taken cyborgisation to new extremes, blending themselves and their animals with machines. This faction had pushed those limits even further, to the point where they were shunned even by the mainstream Chimerics.’
Sky listened and followed what Clown was telling him. Clown’s judgement of Sky’s cognitive skills was adept enough to prevent a lapse into incomprehensibility, while at the same time forcing Sky to concentrate intently on his every word. Sky was aware that not all three-year-olds could have understood what Clown was saying, but that did not concern him in the least.
‘And the dolphins?’
‘Engineered by them. For what purpose, we can’t begin to guess. Perhaps to serve as aquatic infantry, in some planned invasion of Earth’s oceans. Or perhaps they were simply an experiment which was never completed, interrupted by the war’s decline. Whatever the case, a family of dolphins was captured from the Chimerics by agents of the Confederacion Sudamericana.’
That, Sky well knew, was the organisation that had spearheaded the construction of the Flotilla. The Confederacion had remained studiously neutral for most of the war, concentrating on ambitions beyond the narrow confines of the solar system. After garnering a handful of allies, they had built and launched human-kind’s first serious attempt at crossing interstellar space.
‘We took the dolphins with us?’
‘Yes, thinking they’d come in useful at Journey’s End. But removing the augmentation that the Chimerics had added was a lot harder than it looked. In the end it was easier to leave it in place. Then when the next generation of dolphins was born, it was found that they couldn’t communicate with the adults properly unless they had the augmentation as well. So we copied it and implanted it in the young.’
‘But they ended up psychotic.’
Clown registered the tiniest flicker of surprise, his answer not immediately forthcoming. Later Sky would learn that in those frozen moments Clown was seeking advice from one of his parents, or one of the other adults, about how best to respond.
‘Yes…’ Clown said finally. ‘But that wasn’t necessarily our fault.’
‘What, not our fault to keep them down in the hold, with only a few cubic metres to swim around in?’
‘Believe me, the conditions we keep them in now are vastly preferable to the Chimerics’ experimentation lab.’
‘But the dolphins can’t be expected to remember that, can they?’
‘They’re happier, trust me.’
‘How can you know?’
‘Because I’m Clown.’ The mask of his face, ever-smiling, pulled into a more agonised smile. ‘Clown always knows.’ Sky was about to ask Clown exactly what he meant by that when there was a flash of light. It was very bright and sudden, but completely silent, and it had come from the window strip along one wall. When Sky blinked he could still see the after-image of the window: a hard-edged pink rectangle.
‘What happened?’ he asked, still blinking.
But there was something very wrong with Clown, and indeed, with the entire view. In the instant of the flash, Clown had become misshapen, stretched and malformed in all the wrong directions, painted across the walls, his expression frozen. The boat in which they had seemed to be standing curved away in sickeningly distorted perspective. It was as if the entire scene had been rendered in thick wet paint which someone had begun to stir with a stick.
Clown had never allowed that to happen before.
Worse still, the room’s source of illumination — the glowing imagery on the walls — became dark, then black. There was no light save for the faintest milky glow from the high-set window. But even that faded after a while, leaving Sky alone in utter darkness.
‘Clown?’ Sky said, at first quietly, and then with more insistence.
No answer came. Sky began to feel something odd and unwelcome. It came from deep within him; a welling-up of fear and anxiety that had everything to do with a typical three-year-old’s response to the situation and nothing to do with the gloss of adulthood and precosity which normally distanced Sky from other children of his age. He was suddenly a small child, alone in the dark, not understanding what was happening.
He asked for Clown again, but there was desperation in his voice; a realisation that Clown would already have answered him if that were possible. No; Clown was gone; the bright nursery had become dark and — yes — cold, and he could hear nothing; not even the normal background noises of the Santiago.
Sky crawled until he met the wall, and then navigated around the room, trying to find the door. But when the door shut, it sealed itself invisibly flush, and now he could not locate even the hair-thin crack which would have betrayed its position. There was no interior handle or control, for — had he not been banished to the room — Clown would normally have opened the door at his request.
Sky groped for an appropriate response and found that, whether he liked it or not, one was happening to him anyway. He was starting to cry; something he could not remember having done since he was much younger.
He cried and cried and — however long that took — finally ran out of tears, his eyes feeling sore when he rubbed them.
He asked for Clown again, and then listened intently, and still there was nothing. He tried screaming, but that did no good either, and eventually his throat became too raw for him to continue.
He had probably been alone only for twenty minutes, but now that time stretched onwards to what was almost certainly an hour, and then perhaps two hours, and then tortured multiples of hours. Under any circumstances, that time would have seemed long, but not understanding his plight — wondering maybe if it were some deeper punishment his father had not told him about — it was almost an eternity. Then even the idea that Titus was inflicting this on him began to seem unlikely, and while his body shivered, his mind began to explore nastier avenues. He imagined that the nursery had somehow become detached from the rest of the ship, and that he was falling away through space, away from the Santiago — away from the Flotilla — and that by the time anyone knew, it would be far too late to do anything about it. Or perhaps monsters had invaded the ship from beyond the hull, silently exterminating all aboard it, and he was the only person left aboard that they had not yet found, even though it would only be a matter of time…
He heard a scratching from one side of the room.
It was, of course, the adults. They worked the door for some time before persuading it to open, and when it did, a crack of amber light spilled across the floor towards him. His father was the first to enter, accompanied by four or five other grown-ups Sky could not name. They were tall, stooping shapes carrying torches. Their faces were ashen in the torch-light; grave as storybook kings. The air that came into the room was colder than it usually was — it made him shiver even more — and the adults’ breath stabbed out in dragonlike exhalations.
‘He’s safe,’ his father said, to one of the other adults.
‘Good, Titus,’ a man answered. ‘Let’s get him somewhere secure, then we’ll continue working our way downship.’
‘Schuyler, come here.’ His father was kneeling down, his arms open. ‘Come here, my boy. You’re safe now. No need to worry. Been crying, haven’t you?’
‘Clown went away,’ Sky managed.
‘Clown?’ one of the others asked.
His father turned to the man. ‘The nursery’s main educational program, that’s all. It would have been one of the first non-essential processes to be terminated.’
‘Make Clown come back,’ Sky said. ‘Please.’
‘Later,’ his father said. ‘Clown’s… taking a rest, that’s all. He’ll be back in no time at all. And you, my boy, probably want something to eat or drink, don’t you?’
