Hideaway

'Except you, of course.'

They were silent for long moments. Merlin stared out to sea, the Palace's reality utterly solid to him now. He did not think that it felt any less real to the mouse. This was how it could be for all of them, if Gallinule had his way: inhabiting any environment they liked until the Husker threat was over. They could skip over that time if they wished, or spend it exploring a multitude of simulated worlds. The trouble was, would there be anything to lure them back into the real world when the danger had passed? Would they even bother remembering what had come before? The Palace was already tantalising enough. There had been times when Merlin had found it difficult to leave the place. It was like a door into his youth.

'Gallinule . . .' Merlin said. 'There's something I always meant to ask you about the Palace. You've made it as real as humanly possible. There isn't a detail out of place. Sometimes it makes me want to cry, it's so close to what I remember. But there's something missing. Someone, to be exact. Whenever we were here - back in the real Palace, I mean - then she was always here as well.'

Gallinule stared at him in something like horror. 'You're asking me if I ever thought of simulating Mother?'

'Don't tell me it hasn't crossed your mind. I know you could have done it as well.'

'It would have been a travesty.'

Merlin nodded. 'I know. But that doesn't mean you wouldn't have thought of it.'

Gallinule shook his head slowly and sadly, as if infinitely disappointed by his brother's presumption. In the silence that followed, Merlin stared out at the shadow-matter object that hung over the sea. Whatever happened now, he thought, things between him and Gallinule could never be quite the same. It was not simply that he knew Gallinule was lying about their mother. Gallinule would have tried recreating her; anything less would have been an unforgivable lapse in his brother's devotion to detail. No; what had truly come between them was Sayaca. She and Gallinule were lovers now, Merlin knew, and yet this was something that he had never discussed with his brother. Time had passed and now there seemed no sensible way to broach the subject. It was simply there - unavoidable, like the knowledge that they would probably all die before very long. There was nothing to be done about it, so no point in discussing it. But in the same moment he realised something else, something that had been nagging at the back of his mind since the very earliest maps of the anomaly had been transmitted.

'Expand the scale,' he said. 'Zoom out, massively.'

Gallinule looked at him wordlessly, but obeyed his brother all the same. The anomaly shrank towards invisibility.

'Now show the anomaly's position within the system. All planetary positions to be exactly as they are now.'

A vast, luminous orrery filled the sky: concentric circles centred on Bright Boy, with nodal points for the planets.

'Now extend a vector with its origin in the anomaly, parallel to the anomaly's long axis. Make it as long as necessary.'

'What are you thinking?' Gallinule said, all animosity gone now.

'That the anomaly was only ever a pointer, directing our attention to the really important thing. Just do it, will you?'

A straight line knifed out from Ghost - the anomaly insignificant at this scale - and cut across the system, towards Bright Boy and the inner worlds.

Knifing straight through Cinder.

PART FIVE

'I wanted you to be the first to know,' Sayaca said, her semblance standing regally in his quarters like a playing-card monarch. 'We've found signals coming from inside the planet. Gravitational signals - exactly what we'd expect if someone in the shadow universe was trying to contact us.'

Merlin studied the beautiful lines of her face, reminding himself that all he was speaking to was a cunning approximation of the real Sayaca, who was light-hours of communicational time-lag down-system.

'How do they do it? Get a signal across, I mean.'

'There's only one way: you have to move large masses around quickly, creating a high-frequency ripple in space-time. They're using black holes, I think: miniature ones, like the thing you first thought we'd found in Ghost. Charged up and oscillated, so that they give off an amplitude-modulated gravitational wave.'

Merlin shrugged. 'So it wasn't such a stupid idea to begin with.'

Sayaca smiled tolerantly. 'We still don't know how they make and manipulate them. But that doesn't matter for now. What does is that the message is clearly intended for us. It's only commenced since we reached into Cinder's deeper layers. Somehow that action alerted them - whoever they are - to our presence.'

Merlin shivered despite himself. 'Is there any chance that these signals could be picked up by the Huskers as well?'

'Every chance, I'd say - unless they stop before they get here. Which is why we've been working so hard to decode the signal.'

'And you have?'

Sayaca nodded. 'We identified recurrent patterns in the gravitational signal, a block of data that the shadow people were sending over and over again. Within this block of data were two kinds of bits: a strong gravitational pulse and a weaker one, like a one and zero in binary notation. The number of bits in the signal was equal to the product of three primes - definitely not accidental - so we reassembled the data-set along three axes, forming a three-dimensional image.' Sayaca paused and lifted her palm. What appeared in mid-air was a solid rectangular form, slab-sided and featureless. It rotated lazily, revealing its blankness to the audience.

'Doesn't look like much,' Merlin said.

'That's because the outer layer of the solid is all ones. In fact, only a tiny part of its volume is made up of zeroes at all. I'll remove the ones and display only the zero values . . .'

A touch of showmanship: the surface of the box suddenly seemed to be made out of interlocking birds, frozen in formation for an instant before flying in a million different directions. Suddenly what she was showing him made a lot more sense. It was like a ball of loosely knotted string. A map of Cinder's crustal tunnels, plunging more deeply towards the core than their own maps even hinted. Five or six hundred kilometres into the lithosphere.

'But it doesn't tell us anything we wouldn't have learned eventually--' Merlin said.

'No; I think it does.' Sayaca made the image enlarge, until she was showing him the deep end of one particular tunnel. It was capped by a nearly spherical chamber. 'All the other shafts end abruptly, even those that branch off from this one at higher levels. But they've clearly drawn our attention to this chamber. That has to mean something.'

'You think there's something there, don't you?'

'We'll know soon enough. By the time this semblance speaks to you, Gallinule and I will have almost reached that chamber. Wish us the best of luck, won't you? Whatever we find in there, I'm fairly certain it'll change things for us.'

'For better or for worse?'

The semblance smiled. 'We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?'

End times, Merlin thought again. He could taste it in the air: quiet desperation. The long-range sensors sprinkled around the system had picked up the first faint hints of neutrino emission, which might originate with Husker craft moving stealthily towards Bright Boy from interstellar space. And the main swarms up and down the length of the Way had not gone away.

One or two humans had undergone Gallinule's fatal scanning process now, choosing to go ahead of the pack rather than wait for the final stampede. Their patterns were frozen at the moment, but before very long Gallinule's acolytes would weave a simulated environment that the scanned could inhabit. Then, undoubtedly, others would follow. But not many. Merlin was not alone in flinching at the idea of throwing away the flesh just to survive. There were some prices that were simply too high, simply too alien.