He got to the vault and found that he held nothing in his arms after all, that his own naked self had been all there ever was, and knew he had always known that. There would be no other, no remainder or survivor who would walk away again afterwards.
He stood a while at the doorway to the rotunda, drinking in the place where he would lie down to die and something else would rise. It was not his home, not his clan’s territory, not really part of anything or anywhere that he knew except that it was upon Earth, and fashioned by and for his own species, and so was part of his own and his ancestors and his descendants’ aesthetic and intellectual inheritance.
It would, he told himself, have to do.
He wondered again what it was he was supposed to do, what message he was supposed to carry; he had hoped that at some point during all that had passed he might have discovered what the signal he was supposed to act as carrier for actually was, but in this he had been disappointed, if mildly; he had not really expected that to be part of the process. Still, it would have been nice to have known.
He looked around again, knowing that he had lived many lives, and each of them well beyond the term the vast majority of his forbears would have called a natural span, and knowing that he lived on, in a sense, elsewhere, but for all that he still experienced a feeling of regret at leaving the world, however foolish and ultimately trivial it all was, and could not help but let that reluctance detain him, just a few moments longer, to gaze upon the represented face of this small, pleasant garden, and still know that for now, for this moment – which whatever happened in the future always would have happened and always would have contained him – he was alive.
Then he approached the vault and entered it, stepping through the neat wall of cabinets and into one where something – he had no idea what or whom, but hoped they had the best of him, somehow, and that that would help them fulfil whatever their purpose was – would soon be born.
And so he fell asleep, to wake.
* * *
4
‘Shall we go?’ the girl asked, shaking the man with the bloody nose. Gadfium started to nod, but the ape-man jumped down from the mammoth, ran to its trunk, took the end of it and then led the mammoth over to the girl. He squatted in front of her and looked up into her eyes. He extended the hairy hand holding the tip of the beast’s trunk towards her.
‘Relative of yours?’ Oncaterius asked, snorting blood.
The girl said nothing. She stared into the ape-man’s eyes as he whimpered and made little nodding motions and continued to offer his hand and the mammoth’s trunk.
Slowly, the girl put out her hand.
When their hands touched, the little ape-man and the mammoth both disappeared and Gadfium found herself sitting on the ice, looking around, unhurt but still stunned. The girl shivered once. Then she blinked and turned to the man whose collar she held.
‘Come on, Quolier, we have a meeting to attend.’
Adijine stared at the desk screen. ‘What,’ he said, slowly and calmly, ‘the fuck is going on?’
The Security colonel’s face looked grey. He winced a little. ‘Ah, well, sir, we’re not entirely sure. There seems to be some sort of, ah, problem associated with the Cryptosphere’s error-checking protocols. We are in the process of switching to back-up electronic systems where possible but the interfaces are exhibiting crash tendencies under apparent parity contradictions. Ah…’
‘Again, colonel,’ the King said, drumming his fingers on the table top. ‘In Clear.’
‘Well, sir, the situation is somewhat uncertain, but there does appear to be some sort of violent, and, ah, virulent localised contamination centred around the Security unit in Oubliette but which has spread within the fabric of the main structure as far as the outer wall and intermittently elsewhere. We did conjecture that these phenomena might represent some sort of post-armistice sneak attack by the Chapel but they would appear to be having similar and related problems and therefore this hypothesis has been abandoned.’
‘I see, I think,’ Adijine said, looking around the state room as the lights flickered and the desk screen display wavered. ‘And what was the last we heard from Oubliette?’
‘Consistorian Oncaterius was in projected attendance interviewing the asura suspect. Then a disturbance was reported, first in the Cryptosphere and then in base-reality. Back-up Security units are on their way to the focus of the disturbance, though we are experiencing a degree of difficulty in maintaining contact with them. Reports are confused, sir.’
‘As are we all, it would seem,’ the King said, sitting back in his chair. ‘Any further news from the fast-tower?’
‘The situation was under control, last we heard, sir.”
‘And you were fighting – let me get this clear – birds?’
‘Chimeric lammergeiers, sir. The sub-species believed responsible for and certainly associated with some of the Cryptospheric anomalies over the last few days. A number of them were successfully eliminated.’
‘There was talk of a balloon.’
‘An antique vacuum balloon appears to have been released.’
‘Manned?’
‘We are not certain, sir. Reports- ‘
‘- are confused,’ Adijine sighed. ‘Thank you, colonel. Keep me informed.”
‘Sir.’
Adijine left the screen on. He removed his crown and put it back on again, then tried to crypt.
Nothing.
He placed the crown on the desk and leant his head back against the top of the chair, closing his eyes.
Nothing.
He got up and walked to the far end of the room, looking out through the broad windows and down into the depths of the Great Hall. Threads of smoke trailed into the air from the carpet of landscape. Airships floated against the ceiling, rolling helplessly. Then the room’s lights went out and the windows polarised to black.
The King sighed into the darkness.
‘Ah, Adijine, here you are,’ said a half-familiar voice, immediately behind him. He froze.
They stood in a vast circular space with a floor of gleaming gold, a velvet-black ceiling and what appeared to be a single all-round window looking out onto a whitely shining surface and a purple-black sky where stars shone steadily. Above them, suspended as though on nothing, hung a massive orrery; a model of the solar system with a brilliant yellow-white ball of light in the middle and the various planets shown as glassy globes of the appropriate appearance all fixed by slender poles and shafts to thin hoops of blackly shining metal like wet jet.
Under the representation of the sun, there was a brightly lit circular construction like some half-built room. A group of perhaps two dozen people sat on couches and seats within the circle, blinking and looking up and around and at each other. Some looked surprised, some nervous and some gave the impression of trying strenuously to look neither.
The girl, Gadfium and Oncaterius walked across the glistening floor towards the group in the centre. The girl had exchanged her furs for an old-fashioned-looking boiler suit. Oncaterius looked uninjured now but his hands were bound together, as were his feet, with Resiler shackles, forcing him to adopt a shuffling gait. There was a piece of tape across his mouth. He looked quietly furious.
The girl walked into the centre of the group. Gadfium stood with Oncaterius on the circumference. She looked round the people. She recognised all of them; Adijine, the twelve Consistorians, the three most senior Army generals and the heads of the most important clans, with the exception of Aerospace but including Zabel Tuturis, head of the Engineers and leader of the Chapel rebels. They were all bound hand and foot with Resiler spancels and had their mouths taped over like Oncaterius. Also like him, none of them looked particularly pleased with their situation.
Gadfium stared at the slight figure of the young girl, who stood under the model sun, looking round the others, an expression of satisfaction on her face. If what she was seeing was a true representation of this group’s current status… Gadfium thought about it, and found herself gulping.
‘Thank you all for being able to attend at such short notice,’ the girl said, smiling.
Brows furrowed, eyes glared, expressions darkened. Gadfium wondered what it must feel like to be the focus of such concentrated – and potentially potent – wrath. The girl seemed to be revelling in it.
She snapped her fingers. The rest of the vast circular room around them filled instantly with a mass of people, all standing looking in at the group in the centre. Gadfium inspected the nearest faces. All different; just people. They looked real enough, but frozen somehow, as though they were watching in base-level time. Perspective, or the angle of the floor, seemed to have changed; it was as if the whole huge space was now a shallow cone, giving everybody in the room, even those with their backs to the distant windows, a clear view of the group in the centre.