I looked at Childe, paying proper attention to his shape for what seemed the first time.
At last, after so many frustrations, Trintignant had been given free rein to do with us as he wished. He had pumped our heads full of more processing machinery, until our skulls had to be reshaped to accommodate it, becoming sleekly elongated. He cracked our ribcages open and carefully removed our lungs and hearts, putting these organs into storage. The space vacated by one lung was replaced by a closed-cycle blood oxygenating system of the kind carried in spacesuit backpacks, so that we could endure vacuum and had no need to breathe ambient air. The other lung’s volume was filled by a device which circulated refrigerated fluid along a loop of tube, draining the excess heat generated by the stew of neural machines filling our heads. Nutrient systems crammed the remaining thoracic spaces; our hearts were tiny fusion-powered pumps. All other organs — stomach, intestines, genitalia — were removed, along with many bones and muscles. Our remaining limbs were detached and put into storage, replaced by skeletal prosthetics of immense strength, but which could fold and deform to enable us to squeeze through the tightest door. Our bodies were encased in exoskeletal frames to which these limbs were anchored. Finally, Trintignant gave us whiplike counterbalancing tails, and then caused our skins to envelop our metal parts, hardening here and there in lustrous grey patches of organic armour, woven from the same diamond mesh that had been used to reinforce Hirz’s suit.
When he was done, we looked like diamond-hided greyhounds.
Diamond dogs.
I bowed my head. ‘I am Richard.’
‘Then for God’s sake please come back.’
‘Why have you followed us?’
‘To ask you. One final time.’
‘You changed yourself just to come after me?’
Slowly, with the stone grace of a statue, she extended a beckoning hand. Her limbs, like ours, were mechanical, but her basic form was far less canine.
‘Please.’
‘You know I can’t go back now. Not when I’ve come so far.’
Her answer was an eternity arriving. ‘You don’t understand, Richard. This is not what it seems.’
Childe turned his sleek, snouted face to mine.
‘Ignore her,’ he said.
‘No,’ Celestine said, who must have also been attuned to Childe’s laser signals. ‘Don’t listen to him, Richard. He’s tricked and lied to you all along. To all of us. Even to Trintignant. That’s why I came back.’
‘She’s lying,’ Childe said.
‘No. I’m not. Haven’t you got it yet, Richard? Childe’s been here before. This isn’t his first visit to the Spire.’
I convulsed my canine body in a shrug. ‘Nor mine.’
‘I don’t mean since we arrived on Golgotha. I mean before that. Childe’s been to this planet already.’
‘She’s lying,’ Childe repeated.
‘Then how did you know what to expect, in so much detail?’
‘I didn’t. I was just prudent.’ He turned to me, so that only I could read the stammer of his lasers. ‘We are wasting valuable time here, Richard.’
‘Prudent?’ Celestine said. ‘Oh yes; you were damned prudent. Bringing along those other suits, so that when the first ones became too bulky we could still go on. And Trintignant — how did you know he’d come in so handy?’
‘I saw the bodies lying around the base of the Spire,’ Childe answered. ‘They’d been butchered by it.’
‘And?’
‘I decided it would be good to have someone along who had the medical aptitude to put right such injuries.’
‘Yes.’ Celestine nodded. ‘I don’t disagree with that. But that’s no more than part of the truth, is it?’
I looked at Childe and Celestine in turn. ‘Then what is the whole truth?’
‘Those bodies aren’t anything to do with Captain Argyle.’
‘They’re not?’ I said.
‘No.’ Celestine’s words arrived agonisingly slowly, and I began to wish that Trintignant had turned her into a diamond-skinned dog as well. ‘No. Because Argyle never existed. He was a necessary fiction — a reason for Childe knowing at least something about what the Spire entailed. But the truth… well, why don’t you tell us, Childe?’
‘I don’t know what you want me to say.’
Celestine smiled. ‘Only that the bodies are yours.’
His tail flexed impatiently, brushing the floor. ‘I won’t listen to this.’
‘Then don’t. But Trintignant will tell you the same thing. He guessed first, not me.’
She threw something towards me.
I willed time to move more slowly. What she had thrown curved lazily through the air, following a parabola. My mind processed its course and extrapolated its trajectory with deadening precision.
I moved and opened my foreclaw to catch the falling thing.
‘I don’t recognise it,’ I said.
‘Trintignant must have thought you would.’
I looked down at the thing, trying to see it anew. I remembered the Doctor fishing amongst the bones around the Spire’s base; placing something in one of his pockets. This hard, black, irregular, dully pointed thing.
What was it?
I half remembered.
‘There has to be more than this,’ I said.
‘Of course there is,’ Celestine said. ‘The human remains — with the exception of what’s been added since we arrived — are all from the same genetic individual. I know. Trintignant told me.’
‘That isn’t possible.’
‘Oh, it is. With cloning, it’s almost child’s play.’
‘This is nonsense,’ Childe said.
I turned to him now, feeling the faint ghost of an emotion Trintignant had not completely excised. ‘Is it really?’
‘Why would I clone myself?’
‘I’ll answer for him,’ Celestine said. ‘He found this thing, but long, long before he said he did. And he visited it, and set about exploring it, using clones of himself.’
I looked at Childe, expecting him to at least proffer some shred of explanation. Instead, padding on all fours, he crossed into the next room.
The door behind Celestine slammed shut like a steel eyelid.
Childe spoke to us from the next room. ‘My estimate is that we have nine or ten minutes in which to solve the next problem. I am studying it now and it strikes me as… challenging, to say the least. Shall we adjourn any further discussion of trivialities until we’re through?’
‘Childe,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t have done that. Celestine wasn’t consulted…’
‘I assumed she was on the team.’
Celestine stepped into the new room. ‘I wasn’t. At least, I didn’t think I was. But it looks like I am now.’
‘That’s the spirit,’ Childe said. And I realised then where I had seen the small, dark thing that Trintignant had retrieved from the surface of Golgotha.
I might have been mistaken.
But it looked a lot like a devil’s horn.
TWELVE
