of his gaze. ‘I prophesied it. I knew it would happen; that the city would turn monstrous and fill itself with demons and ghouls. I knew that our cleverest, swiftest and tiniest machines would turn against us; corrupting minds and flesh; bringing forth perversities and abominations. I knew there would come a time when we would have to turn to simpler machines; to older and cruder templates.’ He raised a finger, accusingly. ‘All this I foresaw. Do you imagine that I engineered this chair in a mere seven years?’
At the other end of the maggot I saw a worker leaning from a catwalk with something that looked like a chain-saw. He was carving off a huge iridescent scab from the back of Gideon.
I looked at the mottled patch on my coat.
‘That’s good, Ferris,’ Zebra said. ‘You mind if I ask you one final question, before we get on our way?’
He punched his answer into the chair. ‘Yes?’
‘Did you prophesy this?’
Then she took out her gun and shot him.
On the way back up I thought about what Ferris had shown me and what I had learned from Sky’s memories.
The grubs had observed a massive release of energy in the vicinity of the Earth system: five sparks of fire which bore the signature of matter-antimatter annihilation. Five void warrens being pushed up to a speed which would cause no indignation to the Jumper Clowns: a mere eight per cent of light. It was, nonetheless, quite an achievement considering that the primates had still been bashing each other around with bones only a million years earlier.
By the time the five human ships were noticed, the grubs had suffered terrible losses themselves. Their once mighty void warrens had been smashed and shattered by skirmishes with the enemy. In a period which the long- lived grubs looked back upon with sorrow, the warrens had been sundered; split into tinier, nimbler sub-warrens. The large grubs were social creatures and the sundering caused them immense pain, even though they were able to stay in limited contact with their siblings using the Jumper Clowns’ superluminal signalling system.
Eventually, one of the sub-warrens latched onto the five human ships. The sub-warren reshaped itself to match one of the ships it was following. Statistical analysis of ten million years of encounters had shown that the tactic benefited the grubs in the long run, even though it could be disastrous in any single meeting.
Travelling Fearlessly’s plan was simple enough in grub terms. He would study the humans and decide what must be done about them. If they showed signs of expanding massively into this volume of space, creating the kind of disturbance which the eaters would find it hard to miss, then it might prove necessary to cull them. Amongst the surviving species, there were some which had taken it upon themselves to perform such painful-but-necessary cullings.
Travelling Fearlessly hoped that it would not come to that. He hoped that the humans would remain a low- level nuisance that did not require immediate culling. If all they planned to do was settle one or two immediate solar systems, they could probably be left alone for now. Culling was itself an act which ran the risk of attracting eaters, so it was never to be performed unless there was excellent reason. As decades passed and the humans made no move, hostile or otherwise, Travelling Fearlessly moved the void warren closer and closer to the cluster of human ships. Perhaps the thing to do was make his presence known; establish dialogue with the humans and explain the awkwardness of the situation. The grub had been working out how to make the first move when one of the ships had blown up.
The explosion was consistent with the complete detonation of several tonnes of antimatter. Travelling Fearlessly’s void warren had caught much of the blast, damaging the ship’s camouflage integument and killing many of the grubs who had been working near the skin. Their death agonies had reached Travelling Fearlessly through their secretions. He had absorbed what he could of their individual memories, even as the wounded helper grubs were dissolved back down into their organic constituents.
In pain, with half his memories lacerated, Travelling Fearlessly had moved the void warren away from the Flotilla.
But someone had noticed. Oliveira and Lago had arrived shortly afterwards, not really sure what to expect, half believing the old story of a ghost ship; a sixth original member of the Flotilla which had been expunged from history.
That, of course, was not what they had found.
Oliveira had sent Lago in first, to find the fuel they needed to get back, and Lago had quickly realised that he was not in any human ship. When the helper grubs had brought him to Travelling Fearlessly’s chamber, things had gone poorly. Travelling Fearlessly had only been trying to help the creature by pointing out that he did not need to use his spacesuit; that they both breathed the same air. But perhaps the way he had done this — by having helper grubs eat the man’s suit away — had, in hindsight, not been ideal. Lago had become upset and had begun to hurt the helper grubs with the cutting torch. As the fire burned the helpers, Travelling Fearlessly drank in their agonised secretions as if the pain was his own.
It was unpleasant, but he had no choice but to dismantle Lago. Lago, of course, hadn’t taken to that very enthusiastically either, but by then it was too late. The helper grubs had detached most of his extremities and the more interesting components from inside Lago, learning how the various bits of him worked and fitted together, before dissolving his central nervous system into the secretion. Travelling Fearlessly had ingested as many of Lago’s memories as he could make sense of. He had learned how to make the same kinds of sounds as Lago, and how to impart meaning to those sounds, and — copying Lago — he had made a mouth for himself. Other grubs had copied Lago’s sensory organs, or even incorporated bits of him into themselves.
Now, having come to a greater understanding, Travelling Fearlessly understood why Lago had not taken well to his first view of the maggot-ridden chamber. He felt sorry for what he had been forced to do to Lago and tried to make amends by using as much of Lago’s memory and component parts as he could.
He was sure the humans would appreciate this gesture.
‘After Lago came, it was very lonely again,’ the mouth said. ‘Much lonelier than before.’
‘You didn’t grasp loneliness until you ate him, you fucking stupid maggot.’
‘That is… possible.’
‘All right — listen to me carefully. You’ve explained to me that you feel pain. Good. I needed to know that. You presumably have a well-developed instinct for self-preservation, too, or you wouldn’t have survived until now. Well, I have a harbourmaker with me. If you don’t understand the concept, look it up in Lago’s memory. I’m sure he knew.’
There was a pause while the maggot shifted uncomfortably; red fluid sloshing around like seawater under a beached whale. Harbourmakers were nuclear warheads; equipment carried by the Flotilla to assist in the development of Journey’s End.
‘I understand.’
‘Good. Perhaps you can use that gravity trick to stop it from working, but I’m willing to bet that you can’t generate arbitrarily strong fields that easily, or you’d have used something similar to immobilise Lago when he started giving you difficulties.’
‘I told you too much.’
‘Yes, you probably did. But I still want to know more. About this ship, mainly. You were engaged in a war, weren’t you? You may not have been winning it, but my guess is you wouldn’t have survived until now without weapons of some description.’
‘We don’t have weapons.’ The grub’s mouth looked affronted. ‘Only armouring skein.’
‘Armouring skein?’ Sky thought about it for a few moments, trying to get his head into the grub’s mode of thinking. ‘Some kind of projected force technology, is that it? You can put up some kind of field around this ship?’
‘We could, once. But the necessary parts were damaged when the fifth void warren was destroyed. Now only a partial skein can be created. It’s no use at all against an adept enemy like the grub eaters. They see the holes.’
‘All right, listen to me. Do you sense the two small machines approaching us?’
‘Yes. Are they also friends of Lago?’
‘Not quite.’ Well, the shuttle crews might be, he thought — but they were very unlikely to be friends of Sky Haussmann, and that was all that really mattered. ‘I want you to use your skein against those machines — or I use
