‘I wasn’t expecting locals.’
‘There was always an outside chance. From what Betony says, there won’t be any problems, provided we play nice.’ I offered her a hand. ‘Shall we adjourn to the bridge?’
Some of Purslane’s warmth had returned by the time we whisked up-ship and stood before the displayer, our arms around each other and Purslane’s head lolling against my shoulder, as if she was only a yawn away from falling asleep again. I was glad that I had waited until now.
Dalliance
could have provided me with a magnified image of the world hours ago, but I had preferred to delay until we were only seconds out, decelerating hard in preparation for insertion into a polar orbit. When the displayer activated, we were passing through the planet’s equatorial plane, the world growing visibly larger by the second. Betony’s ship was a green dot in the centre of a blurred circle several thousand kilometres ahead of us.
Neume was a dry world, about as far from the Centaurs’ panthalassic as it was possible to get. Ice gripped the planet at the poles, but the rest of it was as arid and silver-grey as pumice. The daylight face shone back at us, but it was the reflection of sunlight on crystal dunes, promising only the parched aridity of a desert. And yet the presence of an atmosphere was evident even now, a quill-thin halo drawn around the edge of the planet. There were even clouds in the atmosphere - wispy, attenuated things, like the ghosts of real clouds - but they were real enough.
‘Can we live down there?’ Purslane asked.
‘People already do, according to Betony.’
‘There’s oxygen. Scapers must have been here. But I don’t see any organisms, no vegetation or animal life.’
‘Perhaps the last tenants changed the atmosphere, and there’s still enough air in the system even though it isn’t being replenished.’
Purslane lifted her head from my shoulder - she was growing more wakeful by the minute. ‘What’s that line across the equator? A ring system?’
‘Not rings,’ I said. ‘Some kind of orbital structure, I think.’
‘Looks ruined,’ Purslane said as the angle changed and the line became a battered, jagged-edged band thrown around the planet. It was obvious now that the band had been a single structure, circuits ago. At one time there would have been perhaps a dozen elevators connecting the planet’s equator to space, radiating out from Neume like spokes until they met the encircling band, ten or eleven thousand kilometres above the ground. Though none of the elevators now reached the surface, some of them still pushed down towards the atmosphere, or extended further out into space. The broken spokes were barnacled and furred, like the whiskery growth of an ice crystal. They had either succumbed to some corrupting rot, or had been built on by another tenant civilisation.
‘Hesperus knew this place,’ Purslane said.
‘What?’
Her hand tightened around mine. ‘Don’t you see it?’
‘See what?’
‘His design - the cartwheel. We’re looking at it. It’s a picture of Neume, from space.’
In a blinding instant I knew that she was right, but I could still not understand what it meant. ‘Why Neume?’ I asked.
‘Because he knew we were coming here. Because he knew something of this world, deep in his memory. Because he only had time and energy to send us one message before he went into deep shutdown.’
‘I still don’t get it. Why send us a picture of Neume? We already knew we were coming here.’
‘So it’s not just a picture. It’s something else - a message. It’s telling us what he wanted us to do.’
We left our ships in polar orbit. Even without trying I recognised some of the others:
Yellow Jester, Midnight Queen, Paper Courtesan, Steel Breeze
... each ship guaranteed the survival of a specific shatterling. My heart gladdened when I saw Cyphel’s
Fire Witch.
I really wanted her to be amongst the living.
We all shared a shuttle down to the surface. By then Aconite and Mezereon had returned from abeyance, and the three other Gentian shatterlings would be brought back to life once we were on Neume. The shuttle also contained the four stasis-bound prisoners, stowed in an aft compartment. Purslane had decided against moving Hesperus for the time being, in case we did more harm than good. We followed Betony’s shuttle into the blue skies of Neume. His was a chrome teardrop, tapering at the rear to an almost impossibly fine spike.
Our shuttle, which belonged to Purslane, was shaped like a deck of cards with a slanting front, perfect for aerial sightseeing. An observation lounge faced the sloping window, raked at an angle that offered an unobstructed view of the ground. Tables and chairs were set around, but none of us was much interested in sitting. We leaned against the polished wood railing before the window, craning for a first glimpse of the tenant civilisation.
‘I’d better fill you in,’ said Betony’s imago, beaming in from the teardrop. He wore a long green gown, purple trousers and heavy black boots striped up the sides with platinum fluting. ‘Neume’s an old world and it’s seen a lot of history - we’re only four thousand years from the Old Place. Settlers were here barely twenty-two kilo-years into the spacefaring era. Do you remember the Commonwealth of the Radiant Expansion?’
Purslane nodded. ‘Dimly.’
‘I’ve a feeling I should,’ I said.
‘Well, you were never much one for ancient history - even the bits you lived through,’ Betony said. Beyond the window, an endless sea of silvery dunes reached to a pale horizon, still curved by altitude. ‘But it’s no crime. I had to bone up on the Commonwealth myself. Didn’t help that it was over and done by the thirtieth millennium and never extended beyond more than fifty or sixty settled systems, depending on which troves you believe. From what we can gather, no one was here
before
that - they found a handful of Prior artefacts in the comet cloud, but that was as far as it went.’
‘Did the Commonwealth scape?’ Purslane asked. ‘I was thinking of the atmosphere.’
‘Had a go, but the ecosystem collapsed before the work was completed. You have to skip forward another thirty thousand before anyone else arrived on Neume, by which time the planet had reset itself. The Bright Efflorescence were the next tenants - they made a decent fist of it. Lasted forty-five thousand and managed to scape not just Neume but four or five other planet-class bodies in the system. Neume’s the only one that survived, though - more’s the pity. If they hadn’t got into a micro-war with the Red Star Imperium they might have achieved something.’
‘And after the Bright Efflorescence?’ I asked.
‘Skip another quarter of a million years and in comes the High Benevolence.’
‘Finally,’ I said, relieved. ‘A galactic superpower I’ve actually heard of.’
‘Well, you’d have to work hard not to have heard of the Benevolence - they
did
last nearly eleven circuits, after all - more than two million years. The Benevolence developed many of the basic principles now used by Scapers: transmutation engines, world-to-world atmosphere pumps, that kind of thing. For a little while Neume was classically Terran. That was when the Benevolence built their great cities - their remains are still the largest surviving structures on the planet.’ Betony looked to the horizon with narrowed eyes. ‘We’re coming up on one of them now. You’d have seen it from space if you’d looked carefully.’
A dark, squared-off finger began to push itself into view. It was a tower, slender as an obelisk, many kilometres tall, apparently intact but leaning at a precarious angle. It looked as if it might topple into the dunes at any moment.
‘Did they build it like that?’ Aconite asked.
‘No,’ Betony said, ‘but it’s been like that for at least a million years, and it should be good for a few million more. It won’t snap, and it’s anchored so deep into the crust it won’t ever fall.’
‘We could build cities like that if we wanted to,’ Mezereon said, her tone petulant.
‘But we haven’t, and the Benevolence did, and now they’ve left their mark on deep time - whereas we’ll be doing well to be remembered a circuit from now.’
Our shuttles descended further, until we were skimming the dunes at an altitude of only a few kilometres - low enough that we would have seen people, had anyone been abroad. But the endless glittering dunes were lifeless. Betony steered his vehicle under the overhang of the leaning obelisk, as if daring us to follow. Purslane instructed her shuttle to tip itself onto its belly, so that we were standing upside down.
The Benevolence structure was sheer black, lacking windows, entrances or landing decks. It was not totally smooth: there were vast, plaque-like designs worked into its towering faces, their edges gleaming with a blue-black of partly reflected sky. I did not know if the designs were abstract shapes, served some weird civic function, or were slogans in the dead language of the Benevolence.
‘Why did they die out?’ I asked, deciding that there was no point in hiding my ignorance.
‘Everyone dies out,’ Betony said. ‘That’s turnover.’
‘We’re still here.’
‘Only because we’ve stretched that same inevitable process across six million years. Doesn’t mean we’re immune to it, only that we found an extension clause.’
‘You’re in an exceptionally cheerful mood,’ Purslane said.
‘Near-extinction will do that to you,’ Betony answered.
We flew on for another half an hour, passing several more Benevolence structures - dark spires jutting from the ground at odd, unsettling angles, alone or in jagged, cactus-like clusters - and then through the eye sockets of a mountainous human skull, its cranium snow-capped. After another twenty minutes of flight, one of the larger cities of the tenant civilisation came slowly into view. By now Neume’s sun was beginning to set towards the west, throwing deep, rippling shadows across the dunes. The city stood dark against the fire-streaked sky.
‘That’s Ymir,’ Betony said. ‘Not the largest city on Neume, but it’s the one best suited to our needs - we’ve been given more or less free run of large parts of it, so we’d best not complain.’
‘Is that where everyone is?’ Aconite asked.
‘More or less. At any one time, one or two shatterlings may be further afield - patrolling the system for incoming ships, visiting the other cities or returning to orbit for intervals of abeyance or rejuvenation - but most of us have been happy to remain in Ymir. It has everything we need, including privacy.’
‘Is this whole planet under a single administration?’ I asked.
‘No - there are at least three primary powers, and a dozen or so second-tier states. They don’t all speak the same dialect, either. But for our purposes we don’t need to worry about that. Neume’s perfectly happy to present itself to us as a monoculture. It’s in their collective interests as much as ours.’
‘So who are we dealing with - and what happened to the High Benevolence?’
‘You really ought to know that,’ Purslane whispered at me.
‘Campion can be forgiven,’ Betony said. ‘The High Benevolence vanished two million years ago - they’ve been gone as long as they existed. Which is a sobering thought given that I still remember when they were up-and-coming nascents with scarcely a hundred systems to their name.’
‘How you prioritise your memories is your own business,’ I said. ‘I prefer to keep recent events near the top of the stack.’
Betony smiled tightly. ‘And I’m a bottom-up kind of man. Each to their own, dear boy. Anyway, the Benevolence ... well, they just
went.
Story has it that they got into a dispute with an aquatic client culture, the Third Phase Nereids, over the cost of a panthalassic scaping. The argument escalated until it encompassed many systems. Another nascent, the Plastic, saw their chance and took over much of the Benevolence’s territory. But the Plastic weren’t with us for very long.’
‘What happened to them?’ Aconite asked.
‘Too inflexible,’ Betony said. ‘After they were gone, all we have left of the Benevolence is their ruins.’
‘Did the Plastic build the space elevators, and the orbital ring?’ I asked.
‘No - they came
much
later - you’re looking at six or seven tenants down the line before that happened. That was the Providers. They were here for at least four hundred and twenty kilo-years before it turned rotten for them.’
‘And the current lot?’ Campion asked.
‘They call themselves the Witnesses. They’re just happy to live here and study and/or worship the Spirit, depending on factional affiliation. They build their cities and towns on the foundations left by the Benevolence - it’s much easier than sinking shafts right down to the surface, and a lot less likely to piss off the Spirit.’
Now that Ymir was close, we could see what he meant. Four stiff black fingers reached from the dunes, each an obelisk of the Benevolence, each tilted halfway to the horizontal. The shortest of the fingers must have been four or five kilometres from end to end, while the longest - one of the two middle digits - was at least eight. From a distance, caught in the sparkling light of the lowering sun, it was as if the fingers were encrusted with jewellery of blue stones and precious metal. But the jewellery
was
Ymir: the Witnesses had constructed their city on the surface of the fingers, with the thickest concentration of structures around the middle portions of the fingers. A dense mass of azure towers thrust from the sloped foundations of the Benevolence relics, fluted and spiralled like the shells of fabulous sea creatures, agleam with gold and silver gilding. A haze of delicate latticed walkways and bridges wrapped itself around the towers of Ymir, with the longer spans reaching from finger to finger. The air spangled with the bright moving motes of vehicles and airborne people, buzzing from tower to tower.
As the shuttles neared Ymir, three of the moving motes sped out to meet us, to provide an escort into one of the largest towers on the longest finger. The escorts were intricate contraptions of gold and ruby, mimicking the designs of ornithopters or dragonflies with gold-feathered or gold-veined mechanical wings, but moving too quickly, and with too much agility, for that to be their sole mode of propulsion. At the head of each craft was a compartment like a swollen eye held in talons, in which a goggled and helmeted pilot lay prone, working an array of control levers. The escorts were themselves accompanied by flapping, gyring bird-sized drones, and the drones by a multitude of even smaller jewel-sized machines.