wheels rumbling on the floor.
‘I still want to see Gideon.’
‘Hey,’ said Ratko, stepping forward to interpose between myself and the man who thought he was Marco Ferris. ‘You heard the man, didn’t you?’
Ratko moved, but he was an amateur. I dropped him, leaving him moaning on the floor with a fractured forearm. I motioned to Zebra to lean down and help herself to the gun Ratko had been about to pull. Now we were both armed. I pulled out my own weapon, while Zebra aimed the other gun at Ferris, or whoever the man really was.
‘Here’s the deal,’ I said. ‘Take me to Gideon. Or take me to Gideon weeping in agony. How does that sound?’
He pushed and tugged at another set of controls, causing the chair to unplug itself from its steam feedlines. I suppose there could have been weapons set into the chair, but I didn’t think they would be fast enough to do him much good.
‘This way,’ Ferris said, after another, briefer period of clattering.
He took us along more tunnels, spiralling downwards again. The chair propelled itself along with a series of rapid puffs, Ferris steering it expertly through narrow chicanes of rock. I wondered about him. Quirrenbach — and perhaps Zebra — appeared to accept that he was delusional. But then if he wasn’t who he claimed, who was he?
‘Tell me how you got here,’ I said. ‘And tell me what it has to do with Gideon.’
More clattering. ‘That’s a long story. Luckily it’s one I’ve often been asked to recount. That’s why I have this pre-programmed statement ready.’
The chair clattered some more and then the voice recommenced: ‘I was born on Yellowstone, created in a steel womb and raised by robots. That was before we could transport living people from star to star. You had to be grown from a frozen egg cell; coaxed to life by robots that had already arrived.’ Ferris had been one of the Amerikanos; that much I knew already. That period was such a long time ago — before even Sky Haussmann’s time — that, in my mind at least, it had begun to blend into a general historical background of sailing ships, conquistadors, concentration camps and black plagues.
‘We found the chasm,’ Ferris told me. ‘That was the odd thing. No one had seen it from Earth’s system, even with the best instruments. It was too small a feature. But as soon as we started exploring our world, there it was. A deep hole in the planet’s crust, belching heat and a mixture of gases we could begin to process for air.
‘It made very little sense, geologically. Oh, I’ve seen the theories — how Yellowstone must have been tidally stressed by an encounter with the gas giant in the distant past, and how all that heat energy in her core has to percolate to the surface, escaping through vents like the chasm. And perhaps there’s some truth in that, though it can’t be the whole story. It doesn’t explain the strangeness of the chasm; why the gases are so different to the rest of the atmosphere: warmer, wetter, several degrees less toxic. It was almost like a calling card. That, in fact, is exactly what it was. I should know. I went down into it to see what was at the bottom.’
He had gone in with one of the atmospheric explorers, spiralling deeper and deeper into the chasm until he was well below the mist layer. Radar kept him from smashing into the sides, but it was still hazardous, and at some point his single-seat craft had suffered a power lapse, causing it to sink even deeper. Eventually he had bottomed out, thirty kilometres beneath the surface. His ship had landed on a layer of lightly packed rubble which filled the entire floor of the chasm. Automated repair processes had kicked in, but it would take tens of hours before the ship could carry him back up to the surface.
With nothing better to do, Ferris had donned one of the atmosphere suits — designed to cope with extremes of pressure, temperature and chemistry — and had begun exploring the layer of rubble. He called it the scree. The warm, wet, oxygen-rich air was steaming up through the gaps in the rocks.
Ferris scrambled down, finding a route through the rubble. It was perilously hot, and he could have fallen to his death many times, but he managed to keep his footing and negotiate a route which took him down hundreds of metres. The rubble pressed down on the layers below, but there were always gaps he could squeeze through; places where he could anchor pitons and lines. The thought of dying was with him always, but it was only ever an abstract thing. None of the first-born Amerikanos had ever had to understand death; they’d never had to watch people grow older than themselves and die. It was something that they did not grasp on a visceral level.
Which was good. Because if Ferris had understood the risks a little better, and understood exactly what death entailed, he probably would not have gone as deeply into the scree as he had.
And he would never have found Gideon.
They must have expanded through space until they met another species, Sky thought — some kind of robot or cyborg intelligence.
Gradually, tediously, he got something resembling a coherent story out of Travelling Fearlessly. The grubs had been a peaceable, innocent starfaring culture for many millions of years until they had run into the machines. The grubs had expanded into space for arcane reasons of their own which Travelling Fearlessly was not able to explain, except to convey that they had little to do with curiosity or a need for resources. It seemed to be simply what grubs did; an imperative which had been hardwired into them in evolutionary antiquity. They had no overwhelming interest in technology or science for their own sakes, seeming to get by on techniques they had acquired so long ago in racial memory terms that the underlying principles had been forgotten.
Predictably, they had not fared well when their outlying colonies had encountered the grub-eating machines. The grub-eaters began to make slow incursions into grub space, pressuring the aliens to modify behaviour patterns that had been locked rigid for tens of millions of years. To survive, the grubs first had to grasp that they were being persecuted.
Even that took a million years to sink in.
Then, with glacial slowness, they began, if not to fight back, then at the very least to develop survival strategies. They abandoned their surface colonies and evacuated themselves entirely into interstellar space, the better to hide from the grub-eaters. They constructed void warrens as large as small planets. By and by they encountered the harried remnants of other species who were also being persecuted by the eaters, though they had a different name for them. The grubs appropriated technologies as it suited their needs, usually without bothering to understand them. Control of gravity and inertia had come from a symbiotic race called the Nestbuilders. A form of instantaneous communication had been bequeathed by a culture who called themselves the Jumper Clowns. The grubs had been sternly admonished when they had asked if the same principles might be extended to instantaneous travel. To the Jumper Clowns there was a fine, blasphemous line between faster-than-light signalling and travel. The one was acceptable within tightly specified parameters of usage. The other was an unspeakable perversion; a concept so distasteful that it caused refined Jumper Clowns to shrivel up and die in revulsion.
Only the most uncouth of young species failed to grasp this.
But for all the technologies that the grubs and their loose allies held, it was never enough to beat the machines. They were always swifter; always stronger. Now and then there were organic victories, but the general drift of things was always such that the grub-eaters would win.
Sky was thinking about that when Gomez called him again. The urgency in his voice was obvious despite the weakness of the signal.
‘Sky. Bad news. The two shuttles have launched a pair of drones. They might just be cameras, but my guess is they’ll have anti-collision warheads on them. They’re on high-gee trajectories and they’ll reach us in about fifteen minutes.’
‘They wouldn’t do it,’ Norquinco said. ‘They wouldn’t attack us without first finding out what’s going on here. They’d run the risk of destroying a whole Flotilla ship which has, um, survivors and supplies on it, just like we thought it would have.’
‘No,’ Sky said. ‘They’d do it — if only to stop us getting hold of whatever they think’s on her.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Why not? It’s exactly what I’d do.’
He told Gomez to sit tight and killed the link. The fraction of a day he had imagined they would have to themselves had now compressed down to less than a quarter of an hour. It was probably not enough time to make it back to the shuttle and get away, even if there had been no obstructions to cut through. But there was still time to do something. Time, in fact, to hear the rest of what Travelling Fearlessly had to say. It might make all the
