Gribelin had his arms folded across his chest. ‘What about seismic?’
‘On the case – again, the data will take a little while to build up.’
From the gondola’s downward-looking windows, Sunday watched as the tentacles picked up loose-lying boulders, lofted them high into the air and then flung them back down at the ground. Other tentacles, spread out as far from the airship as was possible, brushed their tips against the surface to catch the vibrations transmitted through the underlying geography. The arrival times of the impulses would enable Dorcas to build up a seismographic profile of the local terrain, penetrating much deeper than was possible with radar. It was slow and haphazard, though – the airship obviously didn’t come equipped with specialised seismic probes or the routines to crunch the data swiftly – and Sunday wondered what effect all that crashing and banging was having on the Evolvarium’s native inhabitants. If they wanted to approach this search in a discreet manner, without drawing attention to their activities, this struck her as exactly the wrong way to go about it.
‘Eunice, Eunice, Eunice,’ she said under her breath. ‘Why couldn’t you make this simple for us?’
Now that the construct was denied her, she missed having it around. Eunice might be an illusion, a parlour trick that only looked and spoke like a thinking human being. But her eyes were not Sunday’s eyes. And she had seen things Sunday never would.
‘This wasn’t exactly how I was hoping things would pan out,’ Gribelin said, his musty aroma announcing his arrival by her side a moment before he spoke, ‘but I think we can trust Dorcas.’
Sunday was effectively alone now, the other Overfloaters busy with their instruments and technical systems, while Jitendra dug into firsthand summaries of the Evolvarium’s history. ‘You think or you know?’ she asked.
‘Nothing watertight where Dorcas is involved, kid.’ His voice was a low confiding rasp. ‘We’ll just have to take things as they come and . . . be flexible. She can be slippery, that’s a fact. But then so can we.’ He shifted something around in his throat, some loose phlegmy package that obviously felt at home. ‘My manner back there . . . when I first picked you up . . .’ He trailed off, as if he needed some invitation to continue.
‘Go on,’ Sunday obliged.
‘This line of work, you get to meet all sorts. Rich kids, especially. Thrill-seekers. I knew there was money behind you, but . . . you’re not really here for the thrills, are you?’
‘I had a good life on the Moon. I didn’t want any of this. It came after me, not the other way round.’ Sunday fell silent for a moment. ‘You wouldn’t be apologising, would you, Gribelin?’
‘For giving you a hard time?’ He shrugged, as if that was all that needed to be said on the subject. ‘From here on, though . . . whatever happens, when I take a job on, I don’t let my clients down.’
‘And if our host has other ideas?’
‘We’ll play things by ear. And if things get . . . intense, you and the beanpole do exactly what I tell you, all right? No second-guessing old Gribelin. Because if the shit comes down, there won’t be time for a nice chinwag about our options.’
‘We’ll listen,’ Sunday said. ‘Not as if we’re spoilt for choice with guides out here.’ Softly she added, ‘Thank you, Gribelin.’
He made to turn away – she thought he was done with her – but something compelled him to halt. After a silence he said, ‘You asked about the marks on my skull, back when we were driving. Dorcas mentioned my run-in with the Apostate. I figured you’d be even more curious after that.’
‘The way I see it, it’s none of my business.’
‘Way I see it, too. But not everyone would agree.’ Gribelin looked down before continuing, ‘I went a little mad out there. They put ideas in my head. Little dancing men, figures scratched in rock. The Apostate had gone mad himself, once, but I think he got better. It took me longer, and maybe some of it’s still lodged inside me. But that’s between me and the god I don’t believe in.’
The shadows had lengthened and evening winds had begun to howl in from the northern lowlands when Dorcas lifted her gaze from a hooded viewer. ‘I don’t know quite what to make of this,’ she said, fingering the fine- adjustment controls set into the viewer’s side.
‘Not sure how to break it to me that there’s nothing here?’ Sunday asked.
‘No.’ Dorcas pushed her hair back over one ear, to hook it out of her eyes. ‘How to break it to you that we’ve found something. There’s an object down there. It’s metal, and it’s not too far from the surface. Which, frankly, isn’t possible.’
But the digging would have to wait until daybreak. It got cold at night, and cold made everything harder, but that was not the reason for their delay. At night, as the cold and darkness clamped down, the bottom-feeding castes became much less active, generally opting both to conserve energy and cool their external shells as close to the ambient surroundings as possible, so that they were harder to detect. The predators, conversely, became more active. Kills remained difficult, but the likelihood of success, once a pursuit or strike had been initiated, was now much higher. There was never a good time to be down on the surface, Dorcas explained, but night was worse than day, even for Overfloaters, and they would not risk drilling until sunrise.
‘And the golem? We’ve gained this lead on it – what’s the point of throwing it all away now?’
‘Your golem is on land,’ Dorcas said. ‘That means it won’t be going anywhere until sun-up, either. Not if it knows the first thing about the Evolvarium, and wants to make it through to dawn in one piece. So get some sleep. Be our guests.’
But Sunday couldn’t sleep much, not while that thing was down in the rock, calling to her. So that night, while the Overfloater held station and a skeleton crew manned the graveyard shift, she stood in darkness aboard the gondola and watched. Radar and infrared sensors swept the parched, dust-tormented plateau. Very occasionally, halfway to the horizon or further, something would break cover. Fleeting and swift, it would slink across the land’s contours. The ambush predators were experts at concealment, from jack-in-the-box variants that dug themselves into rock holes and natural fissures, compressed like springs, to shapeshifting forms that were able to pancake their bodies into the very top layer of the dust, to lurk unseen. There were things like flatfish and things like snakes. There were also stalking, prowling horrors that quartered the night on endless deterrent patrols, searching for the weak, the maimed or the dead. She saw one of these loping jackal-like things traverse the horizon line: it had so many jointed legs that it appeared to move in spite of itself, riding a bickering tumble of independent limbs. There was also something like a convoy of scorpions, one after another, that might (horrifyingly) have been a single entity, and a flat-topped creature like a house-sized hairbrush, supported on countless bristling centipede legs, that could have been a grazer or a killer.
