Though some pieces of fabric remained, the Spire had retained all the metallic parts of her suit for itself. Even her skull had been cracked open and sucked dry, so that the Spire could winnow the few small precious pieces of metal she carried in her head.
And what it could not use, it had thrown away.
‘We can’t just leave her here,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to do something, bury her… at least put up some kind of marker.’
‘She’s already got one,’ Childe said.
‘What?’
‘The Spire. And the sooner we get back to the shuttle, the sooner we can fix Celestine and get back to it.’
‘A moment, please,’ Trintignant said, fingering through another pile of human remains.
‘Those aren’t anything to do with Hirz,’ Childe said.
Trintignant rose to his feet, slipping something into his suit’s utility belt pocket in the process.
Whatever it had been was small; no larger than a marble or small stone.
‘I’m going home,’ Celestine said, when we were back in the safety of the shuttle. ‘And before you try and talk me out of it, that’s final.’
We were alone in her quarters. Childe had just given up trying to convince her to stay, but he had sent me in to see if I could be more persuasive. My heart, however, was not in it. I had seen what the Spire could do, and I was damned if I was going to be responsible for any blood other than my own.
‘At least let Trintignant take care of your hand,’ I said.
‘I don’t need steel now,’ she said, stroking the glistening blue surgical sleeve which terminated her arm. ‘I can manage without a hand until we’re back in Chasm City. They can grow me a new one while I’m sleeping.’
The Doctor’s musical voice interrupted us, Trintignant’s impassive silver mask poking through into Celestine’s bubbletent partition. ‘If I may be so bold… it may be that my services are the best you can now reasonably hope to attain.’
Celestine looked at Childe, and then at the Doctor, and then at the glistening surgical sleeve.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Nothing. Only some news from home which Childe has allowed me to see.’ Uninvited, Trintignant stepped fully into the room and sealed the partition behind him.
‘What, Doctor?’
‘Rather disturbing news, as it happens. Not long after our departure, something upsetting happened to Chasm City. A blight which afflicted everything contingent upon any microscopic, self-replicating system. Nanotechnology, in other words. I gather the fatalities were numbered in the millions…’
‘You don’t have to sound so bloody cheerful about it.’
Trintignant navigated to the side of the couch where Celestine was resting. ‘I merely stress the point that what we consider state-of-the-art medicine may be somewhat beyond the city’s present capabilities. Of course, much may change before our return…’
‘Then I’ll just have to take that risk, won’t I?’ Celestine said.
‘On your own head be it.’ Trintignant paused and placed something small and hard on Celestine’s table. Then he turned as if to leave, but stopped and spoke again. ‘I am accustomed to it, you know.’
‘Accustomed to what?’ I said.
‘Fear and revulsion. Because of what I have become, and what I have done. But I am not an evil man. Perverse, yes. Given to peculiar desires, most certainly. But emphatically not a monster.’
‘What about your victims, Doctor?’
‘I have always maintained that they gave consent for the procedures I inflicted -’ he corrected himself ‘- performed upon them.’
‘That’s not what the records say.’
‘And who are we to argue with records?’ The light played on his mask in such a fashion as to enhance the half-smile that was always there. ‘Who are we, indeed.’
When Trintignant was gone, I turned to Celestine and said, ‘I’m going back into the Spire. You realise that, don’t you?’
‘I’d guessed, but I still hope I can talk you out of it.’ With her good hand, she fingered the small, hard thing Trintignant had placed on the table. It looked like a misshapen dark stone — whatever the Doctor had found amongst the dead — and for a moment I wondered why he had left it behind.
Then I said, ‘I really don’t think there’s much point. It’s between me and Childe now. He must have known that there’d come a point when I wouldn’t be able to turn away.’
‘No matter what the costs?’ Celestine asked.
‘Nothing’s without a little risk.’
She shook her head, slowly and wonderingly. ‘He really got to you, didn’t he.’
‘No,’ I said, feeling a perverse need to defend my old friend, even when I knew that what Celestine said was perfectly true. ‘It wasn’t Childe, in the end. It was the Spire.’
‘Please, Richard. Think carefully, won’t you?’
I said I would. But we both knew it was a lie.
NINE
Childe and I went back.
I gazed up at it, towering over us like some brutal cenotaph. I saw it with astonishing, diamond-hard clarity. It was as if a smoky veil had been lifted from my vision, permitting thousands of new details and nuances of hue and shade to blast through. Only the tiniest, faintest hint of pixelation — seen whenever I changed my angle of view too sharply — betrayed the fact that this was not quite normal vision, but a cybernetic augmentation.
Our eyes had been removed, the sockets scrubbed and packed with far more efficient sensory devices, wired back into our visual cortices. Our eyeballs waited back at the shuttle, floating in jars like grotesque delicacies. They could be popped back in when we had conquered the Spire.
‘Why not goggles?’ I said when Trintignant had first explained his plans.
‘Too bulky, and too liable to be snatched away. The Spire has a definite taste for metal. From now on, anything vital had better be carried as part of us — not just worn, but internalised.’ The Doctor steepled his silver fingers. ‘If that repulses you, I suggest you concede defeat now.’
‘I’ll decide what repulses me,’ I said.
‘What else?’ Childe said. ‘Without Celestine we’ll need to crack those problems ourselves.’
‘I will increase the density of medichines in your brains,’ Trintignant said. ‘They will weave a web of fullerene tubes, artificial neuronal connections supplanting your existing synaptic topology. ’
‘What good will that do?’
‘The fullerene tubes will conduct nerve signals hundreds of times more rapidly than your existing synaptic pathways. Your neural computation rate will increase. Your subjective sense of elapsed time will slow.’
I stared at the Doctor, horrified and fascinated at the same time. ‘You can do that?’
‘It’s actually rather trivial. The Conjoiners have been doing it since the Transenlightenment, and their methods are well documented. With them I can make time slow to a subjective crawl. The Spire may give you only twenty minutes to solve a room, but I can make it feel like several hours; even one or two days.’
I turned to Childe. ‘You think that’ll be enough?’
‘I think it’ll be a lot better than nothing, but we’ll see.’
But it was better than that.
Trintignant’s machines did more than just supplant our existing and clumsily slow neural pathways. They reshaped them, configuring the topology to enhance mathematical prowess, which took us onto a plateau beyond what the neural modifiers had been capable of doing. We lacked Celestine’s intuitive brilliance, but we had the
