He lowered the audio damping, checked the fisheye display to make sure the gallery floor was clear, and asked House, please, to open the wall.
Before he finished speaking, the frieze before him parted like drawn curtains. He stepped forward into an arched tunnel, unsurprised when the opening sealed itself behind him. An indirect glow rendered his light amplification redundant; he dialed it down, but in deference to his mistrust of Miss Ouagadougou he left the camouflage protocol intact.
The tunnel was undecorated, smooth sided, the walls velvety and dark. It tended downward, the walls corded with shielded cables. Lesser ran into greater to form a vast, inverted mechanical root system, which thickened toward a trunk as he descended. The overall effect was Gigeresque, though the textures were more reminiscent of Leighton’s velvets and silks.
He breathed easier. It was an access tunnel. Which meant, at least potentially, that Miss Ouagadougou had sent him to the right place. “Thank you,” he said, feeling slightly foolish. The city didn’t answer, but neither did the ongoing sense of observation (like a pressure between his shoulder blades) ease. He snorted softly when he realized he had expected it to, and kept walking.
Brightness spilled up the corridor as it leveled. He paused to let his eyes adapt. His wardrobe handled dazzle, but didn’t ensure fine perception.
Fifteen seconds sufficed. He blinked once more, to be sure, and stepped forward into a chamber not much larger than the suite he shared with Vincent. It was bowl shaped, the walls arching to meet overhead in a smooth, steep‑sided dome. He knew he was underground, but the depth of field in the images surrounding him was breathtaking. They were not just projected into the walls, but a full holographic display.
If it weren’t for the tug of gravity on his boots, he might have been adrift in space. New Amazonia’s primary, Kali, glowed enormous and bittersweet orange on his left hand, smeared behind watercolor veils. On his right, totally out of perspective, floated New Amazonia, a cloud‑marbled berry with insignificant ice caps, incrementally closer to its primary than Earth was to Sol, partially shielded from Kali’s greater energy output by the Gorgon’s polychrome embrace.
The fisheye showed him stars on every side. He turned toward the sun. And a peculiar thing happened. The nebula dimmed, parted along his line of sight, and left him staring at the filtered image of Kali. He knew it was filtered, because his wardrobe wasn’t blinking override warnings about staring into it, and everything around it didn’t flicker dim as the utility fog struggled to compensate. The bruise‑limned darkness of sunspots hung vivid against the glare, the ceaseless fidgeting of the corona marked abruptly by the dolphin leap of a solar arch. It seemed close enough to reach out his hand and touch, enormous, though his palm at full extension eclipsed the sphere.
Teeth rolling his lower lip, Kusanagi‑Jones returned to New Amazonia. The veils swept back from it as well, focus tightening, and as the holographic point of view swept in, he found himself retracing the rough course of the lighter that had brought him to this planet. He circled Penthesilea, and there the image hesitated. Waiting, he realized. Hovering like a butterfly on trembling wingbeats, accommodating the wind.
“House, show me the power generation system, please.”
The image swooped again. A flying creature’s preferred perspective, as internal decor mimicking wide open spaces and empty skies would be comforting to a creature with wings, where an ape’s descendent might feel cozy with limited perspectives and broken sight lines, the indication of places to hide.
The sense of falling made his fingers flex, trying to clutch a railing that wasn’t there. He mastered himself, despite the sense that there was nothing to stand on as images rushed past incomprehensibly fast. And then they paused, arrested sharply, and he found himself staring at the back of his own head, the wooly curls of a dark man in a star‑spangled room.
His fisheye–and his own eyes–showed him that the image hewatched hadn’t changed. But the room around the virtual Kusanagi‑Jones dissolved, vanished into clear air, leaving him standing at the bottom of a sphere whose every surface writhed with twisted cable. It was a strangely organic growth, fractal in the way it merged and combined, coming together in a massive, downward‑tending trunk beneath Kusanagi‑Jones’s feet.
The hologram had stripped away the chamber’s walls, showing him what lay behind them. His neck chilled. He rubbed his palms against his thighs. “Follow the cables, please.”
The perspective zoomed down– throughhim, and he blinked at the glimpse of meat and bone and wiring and a momentary cross‑section of a pulsing heart–and chased the tunneling cables down, down, to bedrock and a cavern in the depth‑warmed darkness.
He was no electrical engineer. But an encyclopedic education, RAM‑assisted parsing, and the information he’d chipped when he came out of cryo identified most of the machinery. Capacitors, transformers, batteries, a bank of quantum processors big enough to run a starship: essentially, an electrical substation the size of some Earth cities.
And no sign whatsoever of a generator. Just the power endlessly flowing from the quantum array–
Fromthe quantum array.
“Shit,” Kusanagi‑Jones said. He had an excellent memory. He could recall Elder Singapore’s slightly amused tone precisely, as she had said, But you can’t get there from here.“The power source isn’t on this planet.”
A flicker of motion in his fisheye alerted him a split second before an urbane, perfectly modulated voice answered him. He turned, binocular vision better than peripheral, the fisheye snapping down on the sudden motion and giving him a blurred preview that didn’t remotely prepare him.
The head that hung over him was a meter long from occiput to muzzle, paved about the mouth and up to the eyes on either side with beady scales that ranged in color from azure to indigo. Flatter scales plated under the jaw and down the throat, creamy ivory and sunrise‑yellow. A fluff of threadlike feathers began as a peach‑and‑cream crest between the eyes, broadened to a mane on the neck and down the spine, spread across the flanks, and downed the outside of the thighs. The forelimbs, folded tight against the animal’s ribs, raised towering spikes on either side of its shoulders–the outermost fingers of hands that were curled under to support the front half.
Support it couldn’t have needed, because the entire four‑meter‑long animal was lucently transparent. It was a projection.
“You are wrong, esthelichMichelangelo Osiris Leary Kusanagi‑Jones. Planetary margins are irrelevant. The cosmocline is not in this brane,” the ghost of a Dragon said, and paused before it continued.
“Good morning, esthelich. Kii greets you. Kii is explorer‑caste. Kii speaks for the Consent.”
BOOK TWO
The Mortification of the Flesh
13
“YOU OPPOSE CONSENT,” KII SAID, THE SPIKED TIPS OF folded wings canting back as it settled onto its haunches, knuckles extended before it like a crouching dog’s paws. Its long neck stretched, dipping slightly at the center as it brought its head to Kusanagi‑Jones’s level. Its phantom tongue flicked out, hovered in the air, tested, considered. “You are disloyal.”
Kusanagi‑Jones had no answer. He was poised, defensively, ready to move, to attack or evade. But there was nothing here he could touch, and the creature’s capabilities were unmeasured.