waves, like inspiration to a laudanum-addicted poet. Forqueray had gained an astonishing fluency in arithmetic, able to count huge numbers of things simply by looking at them for a moment.
But Hirz’s change had been the most dramatic of all, something even Childe was taken aback by. On the second pass through the Spire she had been intuiting the answers to many of the problems at a glance, and I was certain that she was not always remembering what the correct answer had been. Now, as we encountered the tasks that had challenged even Celestine, Hirz was still able to perceive the essence of a problem, even if it was beyond her to articulate the details in the formal language of mathematics.
And if she could not yet see her way to selecting the correct answer, she could at least see the one or two answers that were clearly wrong.
‘Hirz is right,’ Celestine said eventually. ‘It’s about topological deformations, stretching operations on solid shapes.’
Once again we were seeing the projected shadows of four-dimensional lattices. On the right side of the door, however, the shadows were of the same objects after they had been stretched and squeezed and generally distorted. The problem was to identify the shadow that could only be formed with a shearing, in addition to the other operations.
It took an hour, but eventually Celestine felt certain that she had selected the right answer. Hirz and I attempted to follow her arguments, but the best we could do was agree that two of the other answers would have been wrong. That, at least, was an improvement on anything we would have been capable of before the medichine infusions, but it was only moderately comforting.
Nonetheless, Celestine had selected the right answer. We moved into the next chamber.
‘This is as far as we can go with these suits,’ Childe said, indicating the door that lay ahead of us. ‘It’ll be a squeeze, even with the lighter suits — except for Hirz, of course.’
‘What’s the air like in here?’ I asked.
‘We could breathe it,’ Forqueray said. ‘And we’ll have to, briefly. But I don’t recommend that we do that for any length of time — at least not until we’re forced into it.’
‘Forced?’ Celestine said. ‘You think the doors are going to keep getting smaller?’
‘I don’t know. But doesn’t it feel as if this place is forcing us to expose ourselves to it, to make ourselves maximally vulnerable? I don’t think it’s done with us just yet.’ He paused, his suit beginning to remove itself. ‘But that doesn’t mean we have to humour it.’
I understood his reluctance. The Spire had hurt him, not us.
Beneath the Ultra suits which had brought us this far we had donned as much of the lightweight versions as was possible. They were skintight suits of reasonably modern design, but they were museum pieces compared to the Ultra equipment. The helmets and much of the breathing gear had been impossible to put on, so we had carried the extra parts strapped to our backs. Despite my fears, the Spire had not objected to this, but I remained acutely aware that we did not yet know all the rules under which we played.
It only took three or four minutes to get out of the bulky suits and into the new ones; most of this time was taken up running status checks. For a minute or so, with the exception of Hirz, we had all breathed Spire air.
It was astringent, blood-hot, humid, and smelt faintly of machine oil.
It was a relief when the helmets flooded with the cold, tasteless air of the suits’ backpack recyclers.
‘Hey.’ Hirz, the only one still wearing her original suit, knelt down and touched the floor. ‘Check this out.’
I followed her, pressing the flimsy fabric of my glove against the surface.
The structure’s vibrations rose and fell with increased strength, as if we had excited it by removing our hard protective shells.
‘It’s like the fucking thing’s getting a hard-on,’ Hirz said.
‘Let’s push on,’ Childe said. ‘We’re still armoured — just not as effectively as before — but if we keep being smart, it won’t matter.’
‘Yeah. But it’s the being smart part that worries me. No one smart would come within pissing distance of this fucking place.’
‘What does that make you, Hirz?’ Celestine asked.
‘Greedier than you’ll ever know,’ she said.
Nonetheless we made good progress for another eleven rooms. Now and then a stained-glass window allowed a view out of Golgotha’s surface, which looked very far below us. By Forqueray’s estimate we had gained forty-five vertical metres since entering the Spire. Although two hundred further metres lay ahead — the bulk of the climb, in fact — for the first time it began to appear possible that we might succeed. That, of course, was contingent on several assumptions. One was that the problems, while growing steadily more difficult, would not become insoluble. The other was that the doorways would not continue to narrow now that we had discarded the bulky suits.
But they did.
As always, the narrowing was imperceptible from room to room, but after five or six it could not be ignored. After ten or fifteen more rooms we would again have to scrape our way between them.
And what if the narrowing continued beyond that point?
‘We won’t be able to go on,’ I said. ‘We won’t fit — even if we’re naked.’
‘You are entirely too defeatist,’ Trintignant said.
Childe sounded reasonable. ‘What would you propose, Doctor?’
‘Nothing more than a few minor readjustments of the basic human body-plan. Just enough to enable us to squeeze through apertures which would be impassable with our current… encumbrances. ’
Trintignant looked avariciously at my arms and legs.
‘It wouldn’t be worth it,’ I said. ‘I’ll accept your help after I’ve been injured, but if you’re thinking that I’d submit to anything more drastic… well, I’m afraid you’re severely mistaken, Doctor.’
‘Amen to that,’ Hirz said. ‘For a while back there, Swift, I really thought this place was getting to you.’
‘It isn’t,’ I said. ‘Not remotely. And in any case, we’re thinking many rooms ahead here, when we might not even be able to get through the next.’
‘I agree,’ Childe said. ‘We’ll take it one at a time. Doctor Trintignant, put your wilder fantasies aside, at least for now.’
‘Consider them relegated to mere daydreams,’ Trintignant said.
So we pushed on.
Now that we had passed through so many doors, it was possible to see that the Spire’s tasks came in waves; that there might, for instance, be a series of problems which depended on prime number theory, followed by another series which hinged on the properties of higher-dimensional solids. For several rooms in sequence we were confronted by questions related to tiling patterns — tessellations — while another sequence tested our understanding of cellular automata: odd chequerboard armies of shapes which obeyed simple rules and yet interacted in stunningly complex ways. The final challenge in each set would always be the hardest; the one where we were most likely to make a mistake. We were quite prepared to take three or four hours to pass each door, if that was the time it took to be certain — in Celestine’s mind at least — that the answer was clear.
And though the shunts were leaching fatigue poisons from our blood, and though the modifiers were enabling us to think with a clarity we had never known before, a kind of exhaustion always crept over us after solving one of the harder challenges. It normally passed in a few tens of minutes, but until then we generally waited before venturing through the now open door, gathering our strength again.
In those quiet minutes we spoke amongst ourselves, discussing what had happened and what we could expect.
‘It’s happened again,’ I said, addressing Celestine on the private channel.
Her answer came back, no more terse than I had expected. ‘What?’
‘For a while the rest of us could keep up with you. Even Hirz. Or, if not keep up, then at least not lose sight of you completely. But you’re pulling ahead again, aren’t you? Those Juggler routines are kicking in again.’
She took her time replying. ‘You have Childe’s medichines.’
‘Yes. But all they can do is work with the basic neural topology, suppressing and enhancing activity without altering the layout of the connections in any significant way. And the ’chines are broad-spectrum; not tuned specifically to any one of us.’
