course, but only by persuading the grub to tell me.’
‘Persuasion?’ I said.
‘He has what we may think of as pain receptors, and regions of his nervous system that produce emotional reactions analogous to fear and panic. It was only a matter of locating them.’
‘So what was it?’ Zebra asked.
‘A communicational device, but a very singular one.’
‘Faster than light?’
‘Not quite,’ he answered me, after the usual pause. ‘Certainly not in the sense that you’d recognise it. It doesn’t transmit or receive information at all. It — and its brethren aboard other grub vessels — don’t need to. They already contain all the information which ever would have been received.’
‘I’m not sure I understand,’ I said.
‘Then let me rephrase what I’ve just said,’ Ferris said, who must have had a reply already queued up. ‘Each and every one of their communicational devices already contains every message that would ever need to be communicated to the vessel in question. The messages are locked inside it, but are inaccessible until the scheduled moment of release. Somewhat in the manner of sealed orders on an old-time sailing ship.’
‘I still don’t follow,’ I said.
Zebra nodded. ‘Me neither.’
‘Listen.’ The man — with what must have been considerable expenditure of effort — leaned forward in his seat. ‘It’s really very simple. The grubs retain a record of every message they would have sent, across all their racial history. Then, deep in their future — deep in what is still our future — they merge the records into something. What, I’ve never really understood — just that it’s some kind of hidden machinery distributed throughout the galaxy. I confess the details have always eluded me. Only the name is clear, and even then the translation is probably no more than approximate. ’ He paused, eyeing us all with his peculiarly cold eyes. ‘Galactic Final Memory. It is — or will be — some kind of vast, living archive. It exists now, I think, only in partial form: a mere skeleton of what it will be, millions or billions of years from now. The point, nonetheless, is simple. The archive — whatever it is — transcends time. It keeps in touch with all the past and future versions of itself, down to the present epoch and deeper into our past. It’s constantly shuffling data up and down, running endless iterations. And the grubs’ communicational device is, as near as I understand it, a chip off the old block. A tiny fragment of the archive, carrying only time-tagged messages between the grubs and a handful of allied species.’
‘What’s to stop the grubs reading messages earlier than they were sent, and figuring out how to avoid future events?’
Again, Ferris had seen that one coming. ‘They can’t. The device’s messages are all encoded — without the key, you can’t get at them. That’s the clever part. The key itself, so far as the grub understood it, would appear to be the instantaneous gravitational background radiation of the universe. When the grubs put a message into the communicational device — this is how they store them, as well — the device senses the gravitational heartbeat of the universe — the ticks of pulsars spiralling towards each other; the low moans of distant black holes devouring stars at the hearts of galaxies. It hears them all, and creates a unique signature: a key with which it encrypts the incoming message. Every device carries those messages, but they can’t be read out until the device satisfies itself that the gravitational background is the same. Or nearly the same — it has to allow for the spatial position of the message recipient, of course. That gives the devices an effective range of a few thousand light-years, apparently — once they get separated beyond that distance, they just don’t recognise the background signature as being correct any more. And any attempt to fake that background, to try and predict what the future gravitational signature of the universe will be like, based on the known contributions — well, it never seems to work. The devices just fold up and die, apparently.’
For centuries, then, the grub must have been able to keep in some kind of contact with its remote allies. Then it had begun to approach the message-store limit of its own communicational device and had begun to transmit only sparingly. The enemy, it was said, had access to those messages as well — their own copies of the devices — so there was always a danger in using them. The creature had imagined that it had been lonely before, when it was being chased, but now it began to understand that it had never really known solitude. Solitude was a hard crushing force, akin to the mountains of rock above it. Yet it had stayed sane, allowing itself to talk to its allies every few tens of years, maintaining a fragile sense of kinship, that it still played a small role in the greater arena of grub affairs.
But Ferris had removed the grub from its ship, severing it with the communicational device. That must have been the start of the creature’s true descent into grub madness.
‘You milk it, don’t you?’ I said. ‘Milk it for Dream Fuel. And more than that. You use its terror and loneliness. You distil those impressions and sell them.’
Ferris piped, ‘We’ve got probes sunk into his brain, reading his neural patterns. Run them through some software up in the Rust Belt, and we get to distil it into something a human can just about handle.’
‘What’s he talking about?’ Zebra asked.
‘Experientials,’ I said. ‘The black kind, with a small maggot motif near the top. I tried one, as a matter of fact. I didn’t know quite what to expect.’
‘I’ve heard of them,’ Zebra said. ‘But I’ve never tried one, and I wasn’t even sure they weren’t an urban myth.’
‘No, they’re for real.’ I remembered the welter of emotions that the experiential had fed into my brain, when I’d tried it aboard the Strelnikov. The predominant feelings had been of awful, crushing claustrophobia and fear — yet underpinned with the gut-churning sense that no matter how oppressive the claustrophobia was, it was preferable to the predator-haunted void beyond. I could still taste the terror that the experiential had instilled in me; subtly alien in flavour, yet recognisable for all that. At the time I’d had trouble understanding why people would pay to experience something like that, but now it all made much more sense. It was all about extremes of experience; anything that would blunt boredom’s edge.
‘What does he get for doing it?’ Zebra asked.
‘Relief,’ said Ferris.
I saw what he meant. Down in the black slime which filled the tank, grey-suited workers were sloshing around with what looked like huge cattle-prods. They were knee-deep in the black stuff. Now and then one of them would run the tip of his prod across the grey side of the maggot, causing a shiver of pain to run along its blimplike length. Pale red stuff squirted out of pores in his mottled silvery skin. One of the workers moved to catch it in a flask.
At the other end, a high, shrill squeal sounded from his mouth parts.
‘I guess he isn’t making Dream Fuel like he used to,’ I said, feeling sickened. ‘What is it? Some kind of organic machinery?’
‘I suppose so,’ Ferris answered, managing to convey the minimum of interest as he did so. ‘He brought the Melding Plague here, after all.’
‘Brought it?’ Zebra said. ‘But he’s been here thousands of years.’
‘Yes. And for all that time he was dormant, until we arrived, scurrying around on the surface with our pathetic little settlements and cities.’
‘Did he know he had it?’ I asked.
‘I very much doubt it. The plague was probably something he carried without even knowing it; an old infection to which he had long since adapted. Dream Fuel might have been only slightly younger; a protection they evolved or engineered for themselves: a living stew of microscopic machines constantly secreted by their bodies. The machines were immune to the plague and held it in check, but they did much more than that. They healed and nourished their host, conveyed information to and from his secondary grubs… eventually, I think, it became so much a part of them that they could no longer have lived without it.’
‘But somehow the plague reached the city,’ I said. ‘How long have you been down here, Ferris?’
‘The better part of four interminable centuries, ever since I discovered him. The plague meant nothing to me, of course — I had nothing in me that it could harm. Conversely, his Dream Fuel — his very blood — kept me alive, without access to any other life-extension procedures.’ He fingered the silver blanket over his frame. ‘Of course, the ageing process has not been totally arrested. Fuel is beneficial, but it is emphatically no miracle cure.’
I asked, ‘Then you’ve never seen Chasm City?’
‘No — but I know what happened.’ He looked hard at me; I felt my body temperature drop under the scrutiny
