Hideaway

'There's something I don't like about our destination, Sayaca. Bright Boy doesn't fit into our normal stellar models. It's too bright for its size, and it's putting out far too many neutrinos. If you're going to hide somewhere, you don't do it around a star that stands out from the crowd.'

'Would it make any difference if Quail had put you in charge rather than Pauraque? Or if the Council had not forbidden you to test the final syrinx?'

Conceivably, he thought, it might well have made a difference. He had been very lucky to retain any kind of seniority after what had happened back then. But the loss of the next to last syrinx had not been the utter disaster his enemies had tried to portray. The machine had still rammed against the Way in a catastrophic manner, but for the first time in living memory, a syrinx had appeared to do something else in the instants before that collision . . . chirping a series of quantum-gravitational variations towards the boundary. And the Way had begun to respond: a strange local alteration in its topology ahead of the syrinx. Puckering, until a dimple formed on the boundary, like the nub of a severed branch on a tree trunk. The dimple was still forming when the syrinx hit.

What, Merlin wondered, would have happened if that impact had been delayed for a few more instants? Might the dimple have finished forming, providing an entry point into the Way?

'I don't think it made any difference to me.'

'They say you hated Quail.'

'I had reasons not to like him, Sayaca. My brother and I both did.'

'But they say Quail rescued you from Plenitude, that he saved your lives while everyone else died.'

'That's true enough.'

'And for that you hated him?'

'He should have left us behind, Sayaca. No; don't look at me like that. You weren't there. You can't understand what it was like.'

'Maybe if I spoke to Gallinule, he'd have more to say about it.' Subtly, she pulled away from him. A few minutes earlier it would have signified nothing, but now that tiny change in their spatial relationship spoke volumes. 'They say you're alike, you and Gallinule. You both look alike too. But there isn't as much similarity as people think.'

PART TWO

'There are definitely tunnels here,' Sayaca said, years later.

Their cutter was parked on an airless plain near Cinder's equator, squatting down on skids like a beached black fish. Bright Boy was almost overhead; a disc of fierce radiance casting razor-edged shadows like pools of ink. Merlin moved over to Sayaca's side of the cabin to see the data she was projecting before her, sketched in ruddy contours. Smelling her, he wanted to bury his face in her hair and turn her face to his before kissing her, but the moment was not right for that. It had not been right for some time.

'Caves, you mean?' Merlin said.

'No, tunnels.' She almost managed to hide her irritation. 'Like I always said they were. Deliberately excavated. Now do you believe me?'

There had been hints of them before, from orbit, during the first months after their arrival around the star. Starling had sent expeditionary teams out to a dozen promising niches in the system, tasking them to assess the benefits of each before a final decision was made. Most of the effort was focused around Cinder and Ghost - they had even put space stations into orbit around the gas giant - but there were teams exploring smaller bodies, even comets and asteroids. Nothing would be dismissed without at least a preliminary study. There were even teams working on fringe ideas like hiding inside the sun's chromosphere.

And for all that, Merlin thought, they still won't allow me near the other syrinx.

But at least Cinder was a kind of distraction. Mapping satellites had been dropped into orbits around all the major bodies in the system, measuring the gravitational fields of each body. The data, unravelled into a density-map, hinted at a puzzling structure within Cinder - a deep network of tunnels riddling the lithosphere. Now they had even better maps, constructed from seismic data. One or two small asteroids hit Cinder every month. With no atmosphere to slow them down, they slammed into the surface at many kilometres per second. The sound waves from those impacts would radiate through the underlying rock, bent into complex wave fronts as they traversed density zones. They would eventually reach the surface again, thousands of kilometres away, but the precise pattern of arrival times - picked up across a network of listening devices studding the surface - would depend on the route that the sound waves had taken.

Now Merlin could see that the tunnels were definitely artificial.

'Who do you think dug them?'

'From here, there's no way we'll ever know.' Sayaca frowned, puzzling over something in her data, and then seemed to drop the annoyance, at least for now, rather than have it spoil her moment of triumph. 'Whoever it was, they tidied up after themselves. We'll have to go down - get into them.'

'Perhaps we'll find somewhere to hide.'

'Or find someone else already hiding.' Sayaca looked into his face, her expression one of complete seriousness.

'Maybe they'll let us hide with them.'

She turned back to her work. 'Or maybe they'd rather we left them alone.'

Several months later, Merlin buckled on an immersion suit, feeling the slight prickling sensation around the nape of his neck as the suit hijacked his spinal nerves. Vision and balance flickered - there was a perceptual jolt he never quite got used to - and then suddenly he was back in the simulated realm of the Palace. He had to admit it was good; much better than the last time he had sampled Gallinule's toy environment.

'You've been busy,' he said.

Gallinule's image smiled. 'It'll do for now. Just wait till you've seen the sunset wing.'

Gallinule led him through the maze of high-ceilinged, baroquely walled corridors that led from the oubliette to the other side of the Palace. They ascended and descended spiral staircases and crossed vertiginous inner chambers spanned by elegantly arched stonework bridges, delicate subtleties of masonry highlighted in sunset fire. The real Palace of Eternal Dusk had been ruined along with every other sign of civilisation when the Huskers had torched Plenitude. This simulation was running in the main encampment inside Cinder, but Gallinule had spread copies of it around the system, wherever he might need a convenient venue for discussion.

'See anything that looks out of place?' Gallinule said.

Merlin looked around, but there was nothing that did not accord with his own memories. Hardly surprising. Of the two of them, Gallinule had always been the one with the eye for detail.

'It's pretty damned good. But why? And how?'

'As a test-bed. Aboard Starthroat, we never needed good simulation techniques. But our lives depend upon making the right choices around Bright Boy. That means we have to be able to simulate any hypothetical situation and experience it as if it were totally real.'

Merlin agreed. The discovery that the tunnels in Cinder were artificial had enormously complicated the hideaway project. They had been excavated by a hypothetical human splinter group, which Sayaca had dubbed the Diggers. No one knew much about them. Certainly they had been more advanced than any part of the Cohort, but while their machines - lining the tunnels like a thick arterial plaque - seemed unfathomably strange, they were not quite strange enough to suggest that they had been installed by the Waymakers. And they were quite clearly human: markings were in a language that the linguists said had ancient links to Main. The Diggers were simply one of the thousands of cultures that had ascended to heights of technical prowess without making any recognisable dent on human history.

'. . . Anyway, who knows what nasty traps the Diggers left us?' Gallinule was saying. 'With simulations, we'll at least be able to prepare for the more obvious surprises.' His youthful image shrugged. 'So I initiated a crash programme to resurrect the old techniques. At the moment we have to wear suits to achieve this level of immersion, but in a year or so we'll be able to step into simulated environments as easily as walking from one room to another.'