‘You’re aboard an alien spacecraft and all you can think of is petty human issues like squabbles over land rights?’
‘Believe me, those things won’t seem so petty in a few years.’ He grasped Norquinco’s arm even tighter, feeling the layers of suit fabric compress beneath his grip. ‘Think, man! Everything could stem from this one moment. Our whole history could be shaped by what happens here and now. We aren’t small players, Norquinco; we’re colossi. Grasp that, just for a instant. And start thinking of the kinds of rewards that come to men who make history happen. Men like us.’ He thought back to the Santiago; of the hidden room where he kept the Chimeric infiltrator. ‘I’ve already made longterm plans, Norquinco. My safety is guaranteed on Journey’s End, even if events turn against us. If that should happen, I’d also arrange for your own safety, your own security. And if things didn’t turn against us, I could make you a very powerful man indeed.’
‘And if I should turn around now, and go back to the shuttle?’
‘I wouldn’t hold it against you,’ Sky said softly. ‘This is a terrifying place, after all. But I wouldn’t guarantee you any sanctuary in the years that lie ahead.’
Norquinco dislodged Sky’s grip from his arm, looking away until he had found his answer. ‘All right. We go on. But we don’t spend more than an hour in this place.’
Sky nodded, though the gesture was wasted. ‘I’m pleased, Norquinco. I knew you were a man who’d see sense.’
They advanced. The going became easier now, as if the shaft was always sloping downwards — it hardly required any effort at all to slither down it. Sky thought of the way the red fluid had moved around him. The local control of gravity was so precise that the fluid had looked alive, flowing like a vastly accelerated slime mould. The creatures that had built the ship had learned to do far more than alter the Higgs field. They could play it like a piano.
Whatever they are, he thought — whether they were all like the maggot — they had to be millions of years in advance of humanity. The Flotilla must seem inexpressibly primitive to them. Perhaps they had not even been sure it was the product of intelligent thinking at all. And yet it had interested them.
The shaft opened out into a huge, smooth-walled cavern. They had emerged a little way up the side of one of its scalloped walls, but the place was so thick with cloying vapour that it was difficult to see the other side. The chamber was bathed in foetid yellow light and the floor was hidden beneath an enormous lake of red fluid which must have been many metres deep. There were dozens of maggots in the lake, some of them almost completely submerged. Many of them were of slightly different sizes and shapes to the one they had seen so far. Some were much larger than a man, and their end-tendrils included specialised appendages and, perhaps, sensory organs. One in particular was looking at Sky and Norquinco now, with a single human-looking eye on the end of a stalk. But by far the largest maggot sat in the middle of the lake, its pale pink body rising metres from the water; tens of metres long. It turned the end of its body towards them, a small crown of tendrils waving frondlike in the air.
There was a mouth beneath the frond; absurdly small against the size of the maggot. It was human in shape, fringed in red, and when it spoke — emitting an immense, booming voice — it formed human sound shapes.
‘Hello,’ it said. ‘I’m Lago.’
I held the vial up to the light for a moment before slipping it into the breach. The way the red fluid twinkled, the way it flowed sluggishly one moment and then with blinding speed the next… it reminded me far too much of the red lake at the heart of the Caleuche. Except that there never was a Caleuche, was there? Just something much stranger, to which the ghost ship myth had attached itself like a parasite. And hadn’t that memory of Sky’s always been there, at the back of my mind? I had recognised Dream Fuel from almost the moment I saw it.
There was enough in that red lake to drown in, I thought.
I slammed the wedding gun against my neck and pushed the Fuel into my carotid artery. There was no rush; no hallucinogenic transition. Fuel was not a drug in that sense; it acted globally across the brain rather than hitting any single region. It wanted only to arrest cellular decay and to repair recent damage; bringing memories back into focus and re-establishing connective pathways that had recently been broken. It seemed to tap into a recent map of what had been, as if the body carried a lingering field which changed more slowly than the cellular patterns themselves. That was why Fuel was able to fix both injuries and memories just as easily, without the drug itself knowing anything about physiology or neuro-anatomy.
‘Quality shit,’ Ratko said. ‘I only use the best myself, man.’
‘Then you’re saying that not everything that comes out of here is as good?’ Zebra asked.
‘Hey, like I said. One for Gideon.’
Ratko led the three of us along a series of twisting, makeshift tunnels. They had been equipped with lights and a rudimentary floor, but they were more or less bored through solid rock. It was as if the complex had been tunnelled back into the chasm wall.
‘I keep hearing rumours,’ I said. ‘About Gideon’s health. Some people think that’s why he’s letting the cheap stuff hit the streets. Because he’s too ill to manage his own lines of supply.’
I hoped I had not said anything which would betray my ignorance of the true situation. But Ratko just said, ‘Gideon’s still producing. That’s all that matters right now.’
‘I won’t know until I see him, will I?’
‘He’s not a pretty sight, I hope you realise.’
I smiled. ‘Word gets around.’
THIRTY-SIX
While Ratko was leading us towards Gideon I allowed the next episode to happen. That was how it seemed, anyway: that now it was up to me when it happened, as if it were simply a case of digging through three-hundred- year-old memories, sorting them into something like chronological order and letting the next lot flood my mind. There was nothing jarringly unfamiliar about it any more. It was as if I half knew exactly what was going to happen, but just hadn’t given the matter much recent thought, like a book I hadn’t opened in a long time, but whose story could never completely surprise me.
Sky and Norquinco were climbing down from the shaft where they had emerged, negotiating the chamber’s slippery, scalloped sides until they were standing near the shore of the red lake.
The maggot which rested in the lake, tens of metres away, had just introduced itself as Lago.
Sky steeled himself. He felt a tremendous sense of fear and strangeness, but he was convinced that it was his destiny to survive this place.
‘Lago?’ he said. ‘I don’t know. From what I gather, Lago was a man.’
‘I’m also that which existed before Lago.’ The voice, though loud, was calm and strangely lacking in menace. ‘This is difficult to say through Lago’s language. I am Lago, but I am also Travelling Fearlessly.’
‘What happened to Lago?’
‘That’s also not easy. Excuse me.’ There was a pause while gallons of red fluid gushed out of the maggot into the lake, and then gallons more flowed up into the maggot. ‘That’s better. Much better. Let me explain. Before Lago there was just Travelling Fearlessly, and Travelling Fearlessly’s helper grubs, and the void warren.’ The tendrils seemed to point out the cavern’s sides and ceiling. ‘But then the void warren was damaged, and many poor helper grubs had to be… there isn’t any word in Lago’s mind for this. Broken down? Dissolved? Degraded? But not lost fully.’
Sky looked at Norquinco, who had not said a word since entering the chamber. ‘What happened before your ship was damaged?’
‘Yes — ship. That’s it. Not void warren. Ship. Much better.’ The mouth smiled horribly and more red fluid rained out of the creature. ‘It’s a long time ago.’
‘Start at the beginning. Why were you following us?’
‘Us?’
‘The Flotilla. The five other ships. Five other void warrens.’ Despite his fear, he felt anger. ‘Christ, it’s not that difficult.’ Sky held up his fist and opened his fingers one at a time. ‘One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Understand?
