changed.’
I bristled. ‘That isn’t true.’
‘Then why turn back when we’ve come so far?’
‘Because it isn’t worth it.’
‘Or is it simply that the problem’s become too difficult; the challenge too great?’
‘Ignore him,’ Celestine said. ‘He’s just trying to goad you into following him. That’s what this has always been about, hasn’t it, Childe? You think you can solve the Spire, where eighteen previous versions of you have failed. Where eighteen previous versions of you were butchered and flayed by the thing.’ She looked around, almost as if she expected the Spire to punish her for speaking so profanely. ‘And perhaps you’re right, too. Perhaps you really have come closer than any of the others.’
Childe said nothing, perhaps unwilling to contradict her.
‘But simply beating the Spire wouldn’t be good enough,’ Celestine said. ‘For you’d have no witnesses. No one to see how clever you’d been.’
‘That isn’t it at all.’
‘Then why did we all have to come here? You found Trintignant useful, I’ll grant you that. And I helped you as well. But you could have done without us, ultimately. It would have been bloodier, and you might have needed to run off a few more clones… but I don’t doubt that you could have done it.’
‘The solution, Celestine.’
By my estimate we had not much more than two minutes left in which to make our selection. And yet I sensed that it was time enough. Magically, the problem had opened up before me where a moment ago it had been insoluble; like one of those optical illusions which suddenly flip from one state to another. The moment was as close to a religious experience as I cared to come.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I see it now. Have you got it?’
‘Not quite. Give me a moment…’ Childe stared at it, and I watched as the lasers from his eyes washed over the labyrinthine engravings. The red glare skittered over the wrong solution and lingered there. It flickered away and alighted on the correct answer, but only momentarily.
Childe flicked his tail. ‘I think I’ve got it.’
‘Good,’ Celestine replied. ‘I agree with you. Richard? Are you ready to make this unanimous?’
I thought I had misheard her, but I had not. She was saying that Childe’s answer was the right one; that the one I had been sure of was the wrong one…
‘I thought…’ I began. Then, desperately, stared at the problem again. Had I missed something? Childe had looked to have his doubts, but Celestine was so certain of herself. And yet what I had glimpsed had appeared beyond question. ‘I don’t know,’ I said weakly. ‘I don’t know.’
‘We haven’t time to debate it. We’ve got less than a minute.’
The feeling in my belly was one of ice. Somehow, despite the layers of humanity that had been stripped from me, I could still taste terror. It was reaching me anyway; refusing to be daunted.
I felt so certain of my choice. And yet I was outnumbered.
‘Richard?’ Childe said again, more insistent this time.
I looked at the two of them, helplessly. ‘Press it,’ I said.
Childe placed his forepaw over the solution that he and Celestine had agreed on, and pressed.
I think I knew, even before the Spire responded, that the choice had not been the correct one. And yet when I looked at Celestine I saw nothing resembling shock or surprise in her expression. Instead, she looked completely calm and resigned.
And then the punishment commenced.
It was brutal, and once it would have killed us. Even with the augmentations Trintignant had given us, the damage inflicted was considerable as a scythe-tipped, triple-jointed pendulum descended from the ceiling and began swinging in viciously widening arcs. Our minds might have been able to compute the future position of a simpler pendulum, steering our bodies out of its harmful path. But the trajectory of a jointed pendulum was ferociously difficult to predict: a nightmarish demonstration of the mathematics of chaos.
But we survived, as we had survived the previous attacks. Even Celestine made it through, the flashing arc snipping off only one of her arms. I lost an arm and leg on one side, and watched — half in horror, half in fascination — as the room claimed these parts for itself; tendrils whipped out from the wall to salvage those useful conglomerations of metal and plastic. There was pain, of a sort, for Trintignant had wired those limbs into our nervous systems, so that we could feel heat and cold. But the pain abated quickly, replaced by digital numbness.
Childe got the worst of it, though.
The blade had sliced him through the middle, just below what had once been his ribcage, spilling steel and plastic guts, bone, viscera, blood and noxious lubricants onto the floor. The tendrils squirmed out and captured the twitching prize of his detached rear end, flicking tail and all.
With the hand that she still had, Celestine pressed the correct symbol. The punishment ceased and the door opened.
In the comparative calm that followed, Childe looked down at his severed trunk.
‘I seem to be quite badly damaged,’ he said.
But already various valves and gaskets were stemming the fluid loss; clicking shut with neat precision. Trintignant, I saw, had done very well. He had equipped Childe to survive the most extreme injuries.
‘You’ll live,’ Celestine said, with what struck me as less than total sympathy.
‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Why didn’t you press that one first?’
She looked at me. ‘Because I knew what had to be done.’
Despite her injuries she helped us on the retreat.
I was able to stumble from room to room, balancing myself against the wall and hopping on my good leg. I had lost no great quantity of blood, for while I had suffered one or two gashes from close approaches of the pendulum, my limbs had been detached below the points where they were anchored to flesh and bone. But I still felt the shivering onset of shock, and all I wanted to do was make it out of the Spire, back to the sanctuary of the shuttle. There, I knew, Trintignant could make me whole again. Human again, for that matter. He had always promised it would be possible, and while there was much about him that I did not like, I did not think he would lie about that. It would be a matter of professional pride that his work was technically reversible.
Celestine carried Childe, tucked under her arm. What remained of him was very light, she said, and he was able to cling to her with his undamaged forepaws. I felt a spasm of horror every time I saw how little of him there was, while shuddering to think how much more intense that spasm would have been were I not already numbed by the medichines.
We had made it back through perhaps one-third of the rooms when he slithered from her grip, thudding to the floor.
‘What are you doing?’ Celestine asked.
‘What do you think?’ He supported himself by his forelimbs, his severed trunk resting against the ground. The wound had begun to close, I saw, his diamond skin puckering tight to seal the damage.
Before very long he would look as if he had been made this way.
Celestine took her time before answering, ‘Quite honestly, I don’t know what to think.’
‘I’m going back. I’m carrying on.’
Still propping myself against a wall, I said, ‘You can’t. You need treatment. For God’s sake; you’ve been cut in half.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Childe said. ‘All I’ve done is lose a part of me I would have been forced to discard before very long. Eventually the doors would have been a tight squeeze even for something shaped like a dog.’
‘It’ll kill you,’ I said.
‘Or I’ll beat it. It’s still possible, you know.’ He turned around, his rear part scraping against the floor, and then looked back over his shoulder. ‘I’m going to retrace my steps back to the room where this happened. I don’t think the Spire will obstruct your retreat until I step — or crawl, as it may be — into the last room we opened. But if I were you, I wouldn’t take too long on the way back.’ Then he looked at me, and again switched on the private frequency. ‘It’s not too late, Richard. You can still come back with me.’
