The challenge that the room held was by far the hardest, even by Celestine’s reckoning. Once again the essence of the task lay in the figures marked on either side of the door, but now these figures were linked by various symbols and connecting loops, like the subway map of a foreign city. We had encountered some of these hieroglyphics before — they were akin to mathematical operators, like the addition and subtraction symbol — but we had never seen so many. And the problem itself was not simply a numerical exercise, but — as far as Celestine could say with any certainty — a problem about topological transformations in four dimensions.
‘Please tell me you see the answer immediately,’ Childe said.
‘I…’ Celestine trailed off. ‘I think I do. I’m just not absolutely certain. I need to think about this for a minute.’
‘Fine. Take all the time you want.’
Celestine fell into a reverie which lasted minutes, and then tens of minutes. Once or twice she would open her mouth and take a breath of air as if in readiness to speak, and on one or two other occasions she took a promising step closer to the door, but none of these things heralded the sudden, intuitive breakthrough we were all hoping for. She always returned to the same silent, standing posture. The time dragged on; first an hour and then the better part of two hours.
All this, I thought, before even Celestine had seen the answer.
It might take days if we were all expected to follow her reasoning.
Finally, however, she spoke. ‘Yes. I see it.’
Childe was the first to answer. ‘Is it the one you thought it was originally?’
‘No.’
‘Great,’ Hirz said.
‘Celestine…’ I said, trying to defuse the situation. ‘Do you understand why you made the wrong choice originally?’
‘Yes. I think so. It was a trick answer; an apparently correct solution which contained a subtle flaw. And what looked like the clearly wrong answer turned out to be the right one.’
‘Right. And you’re certain of that?’
‘I’m not certain of anything, Richard. I’m just saying this is what I believe the answer to be.’
I nodded. ‘I think that’s all any of us can honestly expect. Do you think there’s any chance of the rest of us following your line of argument?’
‘I don’t know. How much do you understand about Kaluza-Klein spaces?’
‘Not a vast amount, I have to admit.’
‘That’s what I feared. I could probably explain my reasoning to some of you, but there’d always be someone who didn’t get it—’ Celestine looked pointedly at Hirz. ‘We could be in this bloody room for weeks before any of us grasp the solution. And the Spire may not tolerate that kind of delay.’
‘We don’t know that,’ I cautioned.
‘No,’ Childe said. ‘On the other hand, we can’t afford to spend weeks solving every room. There’s going to have to come a point where we put our faith in Celestine’s judgement. I think that time may have come.’
I looked at him, remembering that his mathematical fluency had always been superior to mine. The puzzles I had set him had seldom defeated him, even if it had taken weeks for his intensely methodical mind to arrive at the solution. Conversely, he had often managed to beat me by setting a mathematical challenge of similar intricacy to the one now facing Celestine. They were not quite equals, I knew, but neither were their abilities radically different. It was just that, thanks to her experiences with the Pattern Jugglers, Celestine would always arrive at the answer with the superhuman speed of a savant.
‘Are you saying I should just press it, with no consultation?’ Celestine said.
Childe nodded. ‘Provided everyone else agrees with me…’
It was not an easy decision to make, especially after having navigated so many rooms via such a ruthlessly democratic process. But we all saw the sense, even Hirz coming around to our line of thinking in the end.
‘I’m telling you,’ she said. ‘We get through this door, I’m out of here, money or not.’
‘You’re giving up?’ Childe asked.
‘You saw what happened to those poor bastards outside. They must have thought they could keep on solving the next test.’
Childe looked sad, but said, ‘I understand perfectly. But I trust you’ll reassess your decision as soon as we’re through?’
‘Sorry, but my mind’s made up. I’ve had enough of this shit.’ Hirz turned to Celestine. ‘Put us all out of our misery, will you? Make the choice.’
Celestine looked at each of us in turn. ‘Are you ready for this?’
‘We are,’ Childe said, answering for the group. ‘Go ahead.’
Celestine pressed the symbol. There was the usual yawning moment of expectation; a moment that stretched agonisingly. We all stared at the door, willing it to begin sliding open.
This time nothing happened.
‘Oh God…’ Hirz began.
Something happened then, almost before she had finished speaking, but it was over almost before we had sensed any change in the room. It was only afterwards — playing back the visual record captured by our suits — that we were able to make any sense of events.
The walls of the chamber — like every room we had passed through, in fact — had looked totally seamless. But in a flash something emerged from the wall: a rigid, sharp-ended metal rod spearing out at waist-height. It flashed through the air from wall to wall, vanishing like a javelin thrown into water. None of us had time to notice it, let alone react bodily. Even the suits — programmed to move out of the way of obvious moving hazards — were too slow. By the time they began moving, the javelin had been and gone. And if there had been only that one javelin, we might almost have missed it happening at all.
But a second emerged, a fraction of a second after the first, spearing across the room at a slightly different angle.
Forqueray happened to be standing in the way.
The javelin passed through him as if he were made of smoke; its progress was unimpeded by his presence. But it dragged behind it a comet-tail of gore, exploding out of his suit where he had been speared, just below the elbow. The pressure in the room was still considerably less than atmospheric.
Forqueray’s suit reacted with impressive speed, but it was still sluggish compared to the javelin.
It assessed the damage that had been inflicted on the arm, aware of how quickly its self-repair systems could work to seal that inch-wide hole, and came to a rapid conclusion. The integrity could be restored, but not before unacceptable blood and pressure loss. Since its duty was always to keep its wearer alive, no matter what the costs, it opted to sever the arm above the wound; hyper-sharp irised blades snicked through flesh and bone in an instant.
All that took place long before any pain signals had a chance to reach his brain. The first thing Forqueray knew of his misfortune was when his arm clanged to his feet.
‘I think—’ he started saying. Hirz dashed over to the Ultra and did her best to support him.
Forqueray’s truncated arm ended in a smooth silver iris.
‘Don’t talk,’ Childe said.
Forqueray, who was still standing, looked at his injury with something close to fascination. ‘I—’
‘I said don’t talk.’ Childe knelt down and picked up the amputated arm, showing the evidence to Forqueray. The hole went right through it, as cleanly bored as a rifle barrel.
‘I’ll live,’ Forqueray managed.
‘Yes, you will,’ Trintignant said. ‘And you may also count yourself fortunate. Had the projectile pierced your body, rather than one of its extremities, I do not believe we would be having this conversation.’
‘You call this fortunate?’
‘A wound such as yours can be made good with only trivial intervention. We have all the equipment we need aboard the shuttle.’
Hirz looked around uneasily. ‘You think the punishment’s over?’
‘I think we’d know if it wasn’t,’ I said. ‘That was our first mistake, after all. We can expect things to be a little worse in future, of course.’
