“Forget it. The Tok didn't do jokes?”
“That's another linguistic concept that I'm…”
She held up her hand to stop the entity. “Sure. I get it. Let's go see if we can find the core Mind. Does it matter that we're traversing metaspace?”
“I believe it will help. On some level, your ship's core is aware of where we are. Our position may help us to open up a conversation with it, as it may feel safer here than in normal space.”
“Why would it think that, given that you just strolled through metaspace and came on board without any trouble?”
“I don't believe that such abilities are common.”
“Well, that's good to know.” Could she trust Surtr to do this thing, or was she putting the Dragon's Mind at more risk? The Aetheral was so calm and reasonable that it was hard to believe the entity was malign – but maybe she was being fooled. On the other hand, it had done nothing to endanger her, so far as she could tell. Perhaps she needed to learn to trust it. Perhaps she didn't have too many other options. “Okay, let's try it. What do you want to do?”
“There is a doorway that has previously been kept closed.”
“I doubt it very much; I know every micrometre of this ship. I know it almost as well as I know my own body.”
Surtr paused briefly, as if trying to put a difficult concept into words, “Since finding you, I have learned that there are … impulses and areas of knowledge within myself that I did not suspect were there. Perhaps it is the same with your vessel.”
“What does that mean?”
It tried again. “Opening certain doors is not simply a matter of pushing or knocking or triggering proximity sensors. It is a matter of the right influences coming together. At the right moment.”
“I have no idea what that means. Why don't you just show me?”
She followed the Aetheral, which again proceeded on all fours like some hound sniffing out a trail. They wound around the familiar passageways, rising up within the tetrahedral structure. She thought the entity was going to climb to the top observation deck, but it stopped unexpectedly, half-way along an insignificant section of passageway. She must have hurried along it a thousand times without giving it a thought.
“Here,” said Surtr, one hand upon the wall. “The ship's inner eye is through here. I can feel the Mind. It is weak, and fading, but on some level it is aware of me.”
Selene consulted the map of the ship she held in her brain. The structure of the Dragon, the layout of its decks and passageways, was undeniably illogical, as a result of its multiple refits, all of which meant that there were odd-shaped gaps here and there where the corners and curves didn't quite meet. Then there were the larger voids that appeared to be deliberate parts of the ship's original construction.
They were now standing three metres from one of the larger of such gaps, with three of the oddly-shaped offcuts spiralling from it. The inner eye. It was an odd description. Looking at the layout in just the right way, from a certain angle, the space was something like a stylized eye, with three lines of light radiating from it. Odd that she'd never noticed it before. Although, by looking back over the history of the maps she'd built up, she saw that the cavity had increased in size. The hard lines of the Dragon's interior had the habit of sliding around, like a slow-motion equivalent of the observation dome pathways on the Aetheral's ship. She and Ondo had put it down to engineering tolerances, a certain flexibility in the structure that helped absorb impacts, but she'd always had her doubts. This particular cavity had quite clearly grown in the Dragon's very recent past. Another effect of her contacting the core Mind during the Coronade escape, perhaps.
“How do we get in?” she said.
“We knock and walk through.”
“We knock? I thought you said that wasn't the answer.”
“I am attempting to communicate with you metaphorically as that appears to be your preferred mode. It is possible I am not doing so correctly. The area inhabited by the Mind is heavily shielded, but I need to extend my – would you call it an aura? – so that it covers the whole area. By this means, I hope to make myself known to the consciousness that slumbers within. Does that make sense?”
She recalled her own attempts to reach the Mind, her reliance on brute strength and persistence. This seemed like a much less traumatizing approach. “Not in the least. Do it anyway.”
The light that the Aetheral propagated when it passed through bulkheads glowed once again from its body. Studying it up close, she saw that it was more complex than she'd originally thought, pulsing with tiny, high-frequency amplitude fluctuations. Some sort of pattern key? She would have asked Surtr, but the chances were that it didn't know either.
The intensity of the glow increased. A section of the bulkhead wall in front of her stopped being solid polymer and became a patch of light. She filtered out the wavelengths that Surtr was creating, and saw, clearly, that a circle of the bulkhead was physically gone. It was an entrance. A passage into a hidden void that had lain inside the Dragon all along, one that possibly only an entity like Surtr could have opened.
Inside, she could discern an ovoid room. She bounced radio waves off its walls to determine its extent. Physically, it fitted exactly into the gap in the Dragon's floor plans, meaning there was no translocation like the one she'd encountered at the Haven. At the same time, she thought, there was some sense of vast spaces and distances in the room. Of millennial stretches of time. She recalled the metaphorical impressions she'd passed through during the Coronade escape: the inner, negative
