“It’s a lie,” Foord said. “Get us out of here.”
•
The Charles Manson turned in its own length, engaged ion drive at fifty percent, and headed away: not only to escape what She was doing or becoming, but to escape the sixteen hundred feet of confinement they shared with Her in the vastness of the Gulf. Already the oppressive weight of the last few hours, to which none of them would have admitted, began to lift.
The image on the Bridge screen was now a rear view, but it still filled the screen because more of it poured back into the screen from its upper and lower edges as they moved away. At thirty thousand feet, which they reached almost instantly, it still hadn’t diminished. They knew it was a lie. They knew She’d done something to the screen or to the sensors feeding it, or to the fabric of the space between them, but it wouldn’t go. Thahl killed the headup displays which recorded its distance and mass and composition, and wished he could also kill the image. One was a lie, and both were meaningless.
“No,” Foord answered Cyr before she asked, “we’re not running away…Kaang, what’s our distance?”
“Eighty thousand feet, Commander.”
“Take us to a hundred and fifty thousand, please. Cyr, be ready with particle beams.”
“Commander,” Cyr said, “that silver is the same composition as Her pyramid.”
“And it’s a lie. Whatever She’s done to our instruments or our senses, it’s a lie.”
“We never fired beams at the pyramid! If we fire them at that, we don’t know how it’ll react.”
“Whatever it does, will also be a lie.”
“Commander, you seem…”
“No. This is me talking, Cyr. Not Her.”
“That could be Her talking.”
“No. She doesn’t do possession, She does events and predicts our reactions.” Because, he was beginning to suspect, but didn’t dare say, She knows us and has always known us.
•
At one hundred and fifty thousand feet, the image stopped filling the screen. For the first time they could see the whole of it receding, just as if it was a real object, but that only made it stranger.
They had expected that when they could see its boundaries, when they could see the whole of it floating against the backdrop of the Gulf, the lie of its magnitude would give way to what it really was: just a ship, like them. But the silver extrusion blurred its edges and made it look like an oil-smear on a wet pavement. It turned the distance between them into an imagined alleyway, smelling of rain and urine.
Kaang turned the Charles Manson in its own length and brought it to rest, facing Her.
“Thank you, Kaang. Cyr, particle beams, please.”
They stabbed out. Foord imagined them as a wind blowing through the wet alleyway, making rubbish stir on the ground, and posters flap against walls like bats nailed there by one wing. All of this was a lie: particle beams were near-instantaneous, and while Foord’s imaginings were still forming, the beams had already impacted Her starboard side. She did not use Her flickerfields.
The silver extrusion turned the bruise-colour of the beams, then flared white. It swirled away from Her hull, cleanly and easily, as if it had never been more than a cloak someone had thrown over Her which She was now throwing back. As it swirled away from Her, it used the beams’ energy to re-order itself, and became something else. A replica of Her, done in gradations of grey.
“Full-size,” Foord said to Cyr. “Yours was less than quarter-size.” She shot him a venomous glance.
The replica moved slowly towards them, leaving the original behind it. Like the original, it was sideways-on to them, presenting its starboard side. It stopped. Foord motioned Cyr to hold fire.
In front of it, between them, light grey and dark grey shadows of tractor beams—Hers, and theirs—fought each other to stalemate, forming a tangled mass from which, one by one, they removed themselves and were gone. Pallid grey washes of harmonic-gun light played up and down the length of its hull. Grey shadow-lines of lasers peppered it, and were turned back as some of its hull-scales became pewter-grey mirrors. Pale Fire Opals branched in a giant Y above it, swarmed down to enter the two great craters on its unseen port side, and were gone.
More harmonic-gun fire. Light moved inside the replica, an unnameable shade of grey. A line of its windows exploded. From the replica burst a replica of the silver extrusion from which the replica was made. It became a landscape, then a planet’s face. It was a lie, telling a replica of a lie. Pages of light and darkness chased each other across its surface, networks of lines grew over it and diminished, and then it rushed towards them, filling the screen. The shadows of its surface details grew larger. The moment before it hit them one of the grey seas, which had been a lake and before that an exploded window, opened to swallow them.
The replica passed over, under and around them, raking their hull. The Bridge screen switched to a rear view showing it swirling away, dissipating back to what it had always been: almost nothing. Thahl reinstated the Bridge screen headups, and they said it was insubstantial and incapable of analysis. Smithson relayed damage reports one by one: superficial striations on the hull, to add to those they already carried. She should have continued to infinity, Foord thought: one replica makes another, which makes another.
Ahead of them, She remained at a hundred and fifty thousand feet. Nothing of the silver extrusion was left on Her. The Bridge screen, before anyone instructed it, focussed on the line of exploded windows.Their edges were jagged where the explosions had torn out a few surrounding hull-plates, but in each one, set deeper inside than the dark glass had been, was an opaque surface the same dark shade as the patterns spreading over Her. It looked as if they’d been boarded up from inside.
“Particle beams, please, Cyr.”
This time there was no illusion of a dripping alleyway. The beams reached Her immediately, and immediately She deployed Her flickerfields. They held, and continued to hold, with no detectable weakening, as the beams fired again and again. She even returned fire with Her own beams, just once. It was no more than a gesture, and the Charles Manson’s flickerfields held it easily; but the gesture stayed, hanging between them. Maybe, thought Foord sourly, it was only a replica of a gesture.
Again Foord had the beginnings of an erection and the taste of vomit along the sides of his tongue. He still carried the compulsion to destroy Her, and the ambivalence that went with it. He wondered if the compulsion came from him and the ambivalence from Her, but he knew the truth was worse: the ambivalence was his too.
All of this made it a bad time for Cyr to say what she said next.
“‘Insubstantial and incapable of analysis.’ It wasn’t real. We’re still here.”
His glance at her was as venomous as the one she had given him.
“Why is She still here?”
“Because you haven’t done what I suggested, Commander. We should go for Her port side.” She returned his glance; they shared, not body fluids, but venom.
“Kaang.”
“Commander?”
“Take us closeup again. Same distance as before, but this time on Her port side. And Kaang.”
“Yes, Commander?”
“This will be difficult. She doesn’t want us there.”
Faith crawled through the Gulf at thirty percent ion speed. The crippled gait, a mixture of roll and pitch produced by Her impaired drives flowing over the wreckage of the stern crater, was asymmetric and repetitive. Her hull was covered in the swirling watered-silk patterns, dark against the silver of the hull plates. It was like the darkness of the Gulf was bleeding into Her.