we can easily deal with. Golgotha’s tectonically dead, and there haven’t been any large impacts on her surface for a few million years.’
‘Sounds boring,’ Hirz said.
‘And it very probably is, but that isn’t the point. You see, there’s something on Golgotha.’
‘What kind of something?’ Celestine asked.
‘That kind,’ Childe said.
It came over the horizon.
It was tall and dark, its details indistinct. That first view of it was like the first glimpse of a cathedral’s spire through morning fog. It tapered as it rose, constricting to a thin neck before flaring out again into a bulb-shaped finial, which in turn tapered to a needle-sharp point.
Though it was impossible to say how large the thing was, or what it was made of, it was very obviously a structure, as opposed to a peculiar biological or mineral formation. On Grand Teton, vast numbers of tiny single- celled organisms conspired to produce the slime towers which were that world’s most famous natural feature, and while those towers reached impressive heights and were often strangely shaped, they were unmistakably the products of unthinking biological processes rather than conscious design. The structure on Golgotha was too symmetric for that, and entirely too solitary. If it had been a living thing, I would have expected to see others like it, with evidence of a supporting ecology of different organisms.
Even if it were a fossil, millions of years dead, I could not believe that there would be just one on the whole planet.
No. The thing had most definitely been put there.
‘A structure?’ I asked Childe.
‘Yes. Or a machine. It isn’t easy to decide.’ He smiled. ‘I call it Blood Spire. Almost looks innocent, doesn’t it? Until you look closer.’
We spun round the Spire, or whatever it was, viewing it from all directions. Now that we were closer, it was clear that the thing’s surface was densely detailed; patterned and textured with geometrically complex forms, around which snaked intestinal tubes and branching, veinlike bulges. The effect was to undermine my earlier certainty that the thing was non-biological.
Now it looked like some sinewy fusion of animal and machine: something that might have appealed in its grotesquerie to Childe’s demented uncle.
‘How tall is it?’ I asked.
‘Two hundred and fifty metres,’ Childe said.
I saw that now there were tiny glints on Golgotha’s surface, almost like metallic flakes which had fallen from the side of the structure.
‘What are those?’ I asked.
‘Why don’t I show you?’ Childe said.
He enlarged the view still further, until the glints resolved into distinct shapes.
They were people.
Or — more accurately — the remains of what had once been people. It was impossible to say how many there had been. All had been mutilated in some fashion: crushed or pruned or bisected; the tattered ruins of their spacesuits were still visible in one or two places. Severed parts accompanied the bodies, often several tens of metres from the rightful owner.
It was as if they had been flung away in a fit of temper.
‘Who were they?’ Forqueray asked.
‘A crew who happened to slow down in this system to make shield repairs,’ Childe said. ‘Their captain was called Argyle. They chanced upon the Spire and started exploring it, believing it to contain something of immense technological value.’
‘And what happened to them?’
‘They went inside in small teams, sometimes alone. Inside the Spire they passed through a series of challenges, each of which was harder than the last. If they made a mistake, the Spire punished them. The punishments were initially mild, but they became steadily more brutal. The trick was to know when to admit defeat.’
I leaned forward. ‘How do you know all this?’
‘Because Argyle survived. Not long, admittedly, but long enough for my machine to get some sense out of him. It had been on Golgotha the whole time, you see — watching Argyle’s arrival, hiding and recording them as they confronted the Spire. And it watched him crawl out of the Spire, shortly before the last of his colleagues was ejected.’
‘I’m not sure I’m prepared to trust either the testimony of a machine or a dying man,’ I said.
‘You don’t have to,’ Childe answered. ‘You need only consider the evidence of your eyes. Do you see those tracks in the dust? They all lead into the Spire, and there are almost none leading to the bodies.’
‘Meaning what?’ I said.
‘Meaning that they got inside, the way Argyle claimed. Observe also the way the remains are distributed. They’re not all at the same distance from the Spire. They must have been ejected from different heights, suggesting that some got closer to the summit than others. Again, it accords with Argyle’s story.’
With a sinking feeling of inevitability I saw where this was heading. ‘And you want us to go there and find out what it was they were so interested in. Is that it?’
He smiled. ‘You know me entirely too well, Richard.’
‘I thought I did. But you’d have to be quite mad to want to go anywhere near that thing.’
‘Mad? Possibly. Or simply very, very curious. The question is—’ He paused and leaned across the table to refill my glass, all the while maintaining eye contact. ‘Which are you?’
‘Neither,’ I said.
But Childe could be persuasive. A month later I was frozen aboard Forqueray’s ship.
TWO
We reached orbit around Golgotha.
Thawed from reefersleep we convened for breakfast, riding a travel pod upship to the lighthugger’s meeting room.
Everyone was there, including Trintignant and Forqueray, the latter inhaling from the same impressive array of flasks, retorts and spiralling tubes he had brought with him to Yellowstone. Trintignant had not slept with the rest of us, but looked none the worse for wear. He had, Childe said, his own rather specialised plumbing requirements, incompatible with standard reefersleep systems.
‘Well, how was it?’ Childe asked, throwing a comradely arm around my shoulders.
‘Every bit as… dreadful as I’d been led to expect.’ My voice was slurred, sentences taking an age to form in whatever part of my brain it was that handled language. ‘Still a bit fuzzy.’
‘Well, we’ll soon fix that. Trintignant can synthesise a medichine infusion to pep up those neural functions, can’t you, Doctor?’
Trintignant looked at me with his handsome, immobile mask of a face. ‘It would be no trouble at all, my dear fellow…’
‘Thanks.’ I steadied myself; my mind crawled with half-remembered images of the botched cybernetic experiments which had earned Trintignant his notoriety. The thought of him pumping tiny machines into my skull made my skin crawl. ‘But I’ll pass on that for now. No offence intended.’
‘And absolutely none taken.’ Trintignant gestured towards a vacant chair. ‘Come. Sit with us and join in the discussion. The topic, rather interestingly, is the dreams some of us experienced on the way here.’
‘Dreams… ?’ I said. ‘I thought it was just me. I wasn’t the only one?’
‘No,’ Hirz said, ‘you weren’t the only one. I was on a moon in one of them. Earth’s, I think. And I kept on trying to get inside this alien structure. Fucking thing kept killing me, but I’d always keep going back inside, like I
