The problem was as elegant, Byzantine, multi-layered and potentially treacherous as any we had encountered.
Simply looking at it sent my mind careering down avenues of mathematical possibility, glimpsing deep connections between what I had always assumed were theoretically distant realms of logical space. I could have stared at it for hours, in a state of ecstatic transfixion. Unfortunately, we had to solve it, not admire it. And we now had less than nine minutes.
We crowded around the door and for two or three minutes — what felt like two or three hours — nothing was said.
I broke the silence, when I sensed that I needed to think about something else for a moment.
‘Was Celestine right? Did you clone yourself?’
‘Of course he did,’ she said. ‘He was exploring hazardous territory, so he’d have been certain to bring the kind of equipment necessary to regenerate organs.’
Childe turned away from the problem. ‘That isn’t the same as cloning equipment.’
‘Only because of artificially imposed safeguards,’ Celestine answered. ‘Strip those away and you can clone to your heart’s content. Why regenerate a single hand or arm when you can culture a whole body?’
‘What good would that do me? All I’d have done was make a mindless copy of myself.’
I said, ‘Not necessarily. With memory trawls and medichines, you could go some way towards imprinting your personality and memory on any clone you chose.’
‘He’s right,’ Celestine said. ‘It’s easy enough to rescript memories. Richard should know.’
Childe looked back at the problem, which was still as fiercely intractable as when we had entered.
‘Six minutes left,’ he said.
‘Don’t change the fucking subject,’ Celestine said. ‘I want Richard to know exactly what happened here.’
‘Why?’ Childe said. ‘Do you honestly care what happens to him? I saw that look of revulsion when you saw what we’d done to ourselves.’
‘Maybe you do revolt me,’ she said, nodding. ‘But I also care about someone being manipulated.’
‘I haven’t manipulated anyone.’
‘Then tell him the truth about the clones. And the Spire, for that matter.’
Childe returned his attention to the door, evidently torn between solving the problem and silencing Celestine. Less than six minutes now remained, and though I had distracted myself, I had not come closer to grasping the solution, or even seeing a hint of how to begin.
I snapped my attention back to Childe. ‘What happened with the clones? Did you send them in, one by one, hoping to find a way into the Spire for you?’
‘No.’ He almost laughed at my failure to grasp the truth. ‘I didn’t send them in ahead of me, Richard. Not at all. I sent them in after me.’
‘Sorry, but I don’t understand.’
‘I went in first, and the Spire killed me. But before I did that, I trawled myself and installed those memories in a recently grown clone. The clone wasn’t a perfect copy of me, by any means — it had some memories, and some of my grosser personality traits, but it was under no illusions that it was anything but a recently made construct.’ Childe looked back towards the problem. ‘Look, this is all very interesting, but I really think—’
‘The problem can wait,’ Celestine said. ‘I think I see a solution, in any case.’
Childe’s slender body stiffened in anticipation. ‘You do?’
‘Just a hint of one, Childe. Keep your hackles down.’
‘We don’t have much time, Celestine. I’d very much like to hear your solution.’
She looked at the pattern, smiling faintly. ‘I’m sure you would. I’d also like to hear what happened to the clone.’
I sensed him seethe with anger, then bring it under control. ‘It — the new me — went back into the Spire and attempted to make further progress than its predecessor. Which it did, advancing several rooms beyond the point where the old me died.’
‘What made it go in?’ Celestine said. ‘It must have known it would die in there as well.’
‘It thought it had a significantly better chance of survival than the last one. It studied what had happened to the first victim and took precautions — better armour; drugs to enhance mathematical skills; some crude stabs at the medichine therapies we have been using.’
‘And?’ I said. ‘What happened after that one died?’
‘It didn’t die on its first attempt. Like us, it retreated once it sensed it had gone as far as it reasonably could. Each time, it trawled itself — making a copy of its memories. These were inherited by the next clone.’
‘I still don’t get it,’ I said. ‘Why would the clone care what happened to the one after it?’
‘Because… it never expected to die. None of them did. Call that a character trait, if you will.’
‘Overweening arrogance?’ Celestine offered.
‘I’d prefer to think of it as a profound lack of self-doubt. Each clone imagined itself better than its predecessor; incapable of making the same errors. But they still wanted to be trawled, so that — in the unlikely event that they were killed — something would go on. So that, even if that particular clone did not solve the Spire, it would still be something with my genetic heritage that did. Part of the same lineage. Family, if you will.’ His tail flicked impatiently. ‘Four minutes. Celestine… are you ready now?’
‘Almost, but not quite. How many clones were there, Childe? Before you, I mean?’
‘That’s a pretty personal question.’
She shrugged. ‘Fine. I’ll just withhold my solution.’
‘Seventeen,’ Childe said. ‘Plus my original; the first one to go in.’
I absorbed this number; stunned at what it implied. ‘Then you’re… the nineteenth to try and solve the Spire?’
I think he would have smiled at that point, had it been anatomically possible. ‘Like I said, I try and keep it in the family.’
‘You’ve become a monster,’ Celestine said, almost beneath her breath.
It was hard not to see it that way as well. He had inherited the memories from eighteen predecessors, all of whom had died within the Spire’s pain-wracked chambers. It hardly mattered that he had probably never inherited the precise moment of death; the lineage was no less monstrous for that small mercy. And who was to say that some of his ancestor clones had not crawled out of the Spire, horribly mutilated, dying, but still sufficiently alive to succumb to one last trawl?
They said a trawl was all the sharper if it was performed at the moment of death, when damage to the scanned mind mattered less.
‘Celestine’s right,’ I said. ‘You’ve become something worse than the thing you set out to beat.’
Childe appraised me, those dense clusters of optics sweeping over me like gun barrels. ‘Have you looked in a mirror lately, Richard? You’re not exactly the way nature intended, you know.’
‘This is just cosmetic,’ I said. ‘I still have my memories. I haven’t allowed myself to become a—’ I faltered, my brain struggling with vocabulary now that so much of it had been reassigned to the task of cracking the Spire, ‘a perversion,’ I finished.
‘Fine.’ Childe lowered his head; a posture of sadness and resignation. ‘Then go back, if that’s what you want. Let me stay to finish the challenge.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think I will. Celestine? Get us through this door and I’ll come back with you. We’ll leave Childe to his bloody Spire.’
Celestine’s sigh was one of heartfelt relief. ‘Thank God, Richard. I didn’t think I’d be able to convince you quite that easily.’
I nodded towards the door, suggesting that she sketch out what she thought was the likely solution. It still looked devilishly hard to me, but now that I refocused my mind on it, I thought I began to see the faintest hint of an approach, if not a full-blooded solution.
But Childe was speaking again. ‘Oh, you shouldn’t sound so surprised,’ he said. ‘I always knew he’d turn back as soon as the going got tough. That’s always been his way. I shouldn’t have deceived myself that he’d have
