The gigantic web of ebony vapour wouldn’t touch the probes, either, denying them a sample/return mission. Radar was utterly
useless. Even laser radar could only just track the modified MSVs. Ten days after the axial light tube was powered up, they
were floundering badly. No experiment or observation they’d run had resulted in the acquisition of hard data. Without that,
they couldn’t even start to theorize how to get back.
By contrast, life inside the habitat was becoming more ordered, though not necessarily pleasant. Everybody who’d been possessed
required medical treatment of some kind. Worst hit were the elderly, whose possessors had quite relentlessly twisted and moulded
their flesh into the more vigorous contours sported by youthful bodies. Anyone who’d been overweight was also suffering. As
were the thin, the short; anyone with different skin colour to their possessor, different hair. And without exception, everyone’s
features had been morphed—that came as naturally as breathing to the possessed.
Valisk didn’t have anything like the number of medical nanonic packages required to treat the population. Those packages that
were available operated at a very low efficiency level. Medical staff who could program them correctly shared the same psychologically
fragile demeanour as all the recently de-possessed. And Rubra’s descendants were tremendously busy just trying to keep the
habitat supplied with power to give much assistance to the sick. Besides, the numbers were stacked hard and high against them.
After the initial burst of optimism at the return of light, a grim resignation settled among the refugees as more and more
of their circumstances were revealed to them. An exodus began. They started walking towards the caverns of the northern endcap.
Long caravans of people wound their way out from the starscraper lobby parks, trampling down the dainty parkland paths as
they set off down the interior. In many cases, it took several days to walk the twenty kilometre length across the scrub desert.
They were searching for a haven where the medical packages would work properly, where there was some kind of organized authority,
a decent meal, a place where the ghosts didn’t lurk around the boundaries. That grail wasn’t to be found amid the decrepit
slums encircling the starscraper lobbies.
I don’t know what the hell they expect me to do for them,
the habitat personality complained to Dariat (among others) as the first groups set out.
There’s not enough food in the caverns, for a start.
Then you’d better work out how to get hold of some,
Dariat replied.
Because they’ve got the right idea. The starscrapers can’t support them any more.
Power within the towers was as erratic as it had been ever since they arrived in the dark continuum. The lifts didn’t work.
Food secretion organs extruded inedible sludge. Digestion organs were unable to process and flush the waste. Air circulation
tubules spluttered and wheezed.
If the starscrapers can’t sustain them, then the caverns certainly won’t be able to,
the personality replied.
Nonsense. Half the trees in your interior are fruiting varieties.
Barely a quarter. In any case, all the orchards are down at the southern end.
Then get teams organized to pick the fruit, and strip the remaining supplies from the starscrapers. You’d have to do this,
anyway. You are the government here, remember. They’ll do as you tell them; they always have. It’ll be a comfort having the
old authority figure take charge again.
All right, all right. I don’t need the psychology lectures.
Order, of a kind, was established. The caverns came to resemble a blend of nomad camps and field hospital triage wards. People
slumped where they found a spare patch of ground, waiting to be told what to do next. The personality resumed its accustomed
role, and started issuing orders. Cancers and aggravated anorexias were assessed and prioritized, the medical packages distributed
accordingly. Like the fusion generators and physics lab equipment, they worked best in the deeper caverns. Teams were formed
from the healthiest, and assigned to food procurement duties. There were also teams to strip the starscrapers of equipment,
clothes, blankets—a broad range of essentials. Transport had to be organized.
The ghosts followed faithfully after their old hosts, of course, flittering across the desert during the twilight hours to
skulk about in the hollows and crevices decorating the base of the northern endcap during the day. Naked hostility continued
to act as an intangible buffer, preventing them from entering any of the subterranean passages.
It also expelled Dariat. The refugees didn’t distinguish between ghosts. In any case, had they discovered he was the architect
of their current status, their antipathy would probably have wiped him out altogether. His one consolation was that the personality
was now part self. It wouldn’t disregard him and his needs as an annoying irritation.
In part he was right, though the assumption of privilege was an arrogant one—the pure Dariat of old. However, in these strange,
dire times, there were even useful jobs to be had for cooperative ghosts. The personality gave him Tolton as a partner, and
detailed the pair of them to take an inventory of the starscrapers.
“Him!” Tolton had exclaimed in dismay when Erentz explained his new duties.
She looked from the shocked and indignant street poet to the fat ghost with his mocking smile. “You worked well together before,”
she ventured. “I’m proof of that.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Okay. Most of that row need seeing to.” She gestured at the long line of beds along the polyp wall. It was one of eight similar
rows in the vaulting cavern; made up from mattresses or clustered pillows hurriedly shoved into a loose kind of order. The
ailing occupants were wrapped in dirty blankets like big shivering pupas. They moaned and drooled and soiled themselves as
the nanonic packages sluggishly repaired their damaged cells. Their helpless state meant they needed constant nursing. And
there were few enough people left over from the teams prospecting the habitat able to do that.
“Which starscraper do we start with?” Tolton asked.
Each starscraper took at least three days to inventory properly. They’d adopted a comfortable routine by the time they started
on their third, the Djerba. The tower had survived Valisk’s recent calamities with minimal damage. Kiera’s wrecking teams
hadn’t got round to “reclaiming” it from Rubra’s control. There had been few clashes between possessed and servitors inside
before it was abandoned. That meant it should contain plenty of useful items. They just needed cataloguing.
To send the work teams down on a see/grab brief was inefficient, especially as there were so few of them. And the personality’s
thought routines had almost been banished from the habitat’s extremities; its memories of room contents were unreliable at
best.
“Mostly offices,” Tolton decided as he waved a lightstick around. He was holding one in his hand, with another two slung across
his chest on improvised straps. Together, the three units provided almost as much illumination as one working at full efficiency.
“Looks like it,” Dariat said. They were on the twenty-third floor vestibule, where the walls were broken by anonymously identical
doors. Tall potted plants in big troughs were wilting, deprived of light their leaves were turning yellow-brown and falling
onto the blue and white carpet.
They moved down the vestibule, reading names on the doors. So far offices had resulted in very few worthwhile finds; they’d
learned that unless the company was a hardware or medical supplier there was little point in going in and searching. Occasionally
the personality’s localized memory would recall a useful item, but the neural strata was becoming more incapable with each
floor they descended.
“Thirty years,” Tolton mused. “That’s a long time to hate.” There hadn’t been much else to do except swap life stories.
Dariat smiled in recollection. “You’d understand if you’d ever seen Anastasia. She was the most perfect girl ever to be born.”
“Sounds like I’ll have to write about her some time. But I think your story is more interesting. Man, there’s a lot of suffering
in you. You died for her, you actually did it. Actually went and killed yourself. I thought that kind of thing really did
only happen in poems and Russian novels.”
“Don’t be too impressed. I only did it after I knew for sure souls existed. Besides—” He gestured down at his huge frame and
grubby toga. “I wasn’t losing a lot.”
“Yeah? Well I’m no sensevise star, but I’m hanging on to what I’ve got for as long as I can.
Especially
now I know there are souls.”
“Don’t worry about the beyond. You can leave it behind if you really want to.”
“Tell that to the ghosts upstairs. In fact, I’m even keener to hang on to my body while we’re in this continuum.”
Tolton stopped outside a sensevise recording studio, and gave Dariat a shrewd look. “You’re in touch with the personality,
is there any chance of us getting out of here?”
“Too early to say. We really don’t know very much about the dark continuum yet.”
“Hey, this is me you’re talking to. I survived the whole occupation, you know. Quit with the company line and level with me.”
“I wasn’t going to hold anything back. The one conjecture all my illustrious relatives are worried about is the lobster pot.”
“Lobster pot?”
“Once you get in, you can’t get out. It’s the energy levels, you see. Judging by the way our energy is being absorbed by this
continuum’s fabric it doesn’t have the same active energy state. We’re louder and stronger than normal conditions here. And
that strength is slowly being drained away, just by being here. It’s an entropy equilibrium effect. Everything levels out
in the end. So if we take height as a metaphor, we’re at the bottom of a very deep hole with our universe at the top; which
means it’s going to take a hell of an effort to lift ourselves out again. Logically, we need to escape through some kind of
wormhole. But even if we knew how to align its terminus coordinates so that it opens inside our own universe, it’s going to
be incredibly difficult to generate one. Back in our universe, they took a lot of very precisely focused energy to open, and
the nature of this continuum works against that. With this constant debilitation effect, it may not be possible to concentrate
enough energy, it’ll dissipate before it reaches critical distortion point.”
“Shit. There’s got to be something we can do.”
“If those rules do apply, our best bet is to try and send a message out. That’s what the personality and my relatives are
working towards. If they know where we are, the Confederation might be able to open a wormhole to us from their side.”
“
Might
be able?”
“All new suggestions welcome. But as it stands, getting them to lower us a rope is the best we can come up with.”
“Some rescue plan. The Confederation has its own problems right now.”
“If they can learn how to grab us back, they’ll be half way to solving them.”
“Sure.”
They reached the end of the vestibule and automatically turned round.
Nothing here,
Dariat reported.
We’re moving down to the twenty-fourth floor.
All right,
the personality replied.
There’s a hotel, the Bringnal, a couple of floors down from where you are now. Check its main linen store, we need more blankets.
You’re going to ask one of the teams to lug blankets up twenty-five floors?
All the large hoards above that level have been used. And right now it’s easier to find new ones than wash the old; nobody’s
got enough energy for that.
All right.
Dariat faced Tolton, taking care to exaggerate his speech. “They want us to find blankets.”
“Sounds like a real priority job we got ourselves here.” Tolton slithered through a partly open muscle membrane and into the
stairwell. The quivering lips didn’t bother him nearly so much now.
Dariat followed him, taking care to use the gap. He could slip through solid surfaces, he’d found, if he really wanted to.
It was like sinking through ice.
One of the random power surges flowered around them. Electrophorescent cells shone brightly again, illuminating the stairs
in stark blue-tinged light. A jet of foggy air streamed out of a tubule vent, sounding like a sorrowful sigh. A thin film
of grey water was slicking every surface. Tolton could see the breath in front of his face. He gripped the handrail tighter,
fearful of slipping.
“We’re not going to be able to salvage stuff from the starscrapers for much longer,” Tolton said, wiping his hand against
his leather jacket. “They’re getting worse.”
“You should see what kind of state the ducts and tubules are in.”
The street poet grunted in resentment. He was actually eating a lot better than most of the population. Inventory duties had
a great many perks. The private apartments with their small stocks of quality food and fashionable clothes were his to pick
over as he wished. The salvage teams were only interested in the larger stores that were in restaurants and bars. And now
the endless succession of lightless floors no longer bothered him, he was glad to be away from the caverns with all their
suffering—and smell.
Dariat.
The startled tone made him halt.
What?
There’s something outside.
Affinity made him aware of the consternation spreading through his relatives, most of whom were in the counter-rotating spaceport
and the caverns.
Show me.
One of the slow flares of red and blue phosphorescence was shimmering through the ebony nebula, sixty kilometres away from
the southern endcap. As it dwindled, several more began to bloom in the distance, sending pastel waves of light washing across
the gigantic habitat’s shell. The personality didn’t believe the sudden increase in frequency was a coincidence. It was busy
concentrating on collecting the images from its external sensitive cells. Once again, Dariat was uncomfortably aware of the
effort expended in what should be a simple observation routine.