“Remind you of anything?” Caillebot asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Milk splashing into milk, perhaps. That ring of stalks, with the little spheres on top of each one, and then the tall one in the middle—”
“That’s exactly what it is,” Parnasse said.
“A perfect representation of a physical instant. That’s the original Museum of Cybernetics. Then the Civic Planning Committee got it into their heads that what it really needed was a gigantic single stalk rising from the middle, to house the polling core in the sphere on top. Completely ruined the purity of the original concept, needless to say. You can’t get a central stalk and a ring of stalks from a single splash, no matter how hard you try.”
“Why did the core need a new housing?”
“It didn’t,” Parnasse said, before anyone else had a chance to contribute.
“It worked fine the way it used to be, out of sight and out of mind. Then the Civic Planning Committee decided we needed to celebrate our embracing of true Demarchist principles by making the core a visible symbol that could be seen from anywhere in the habitat.”
“Most people like the new arrangement,” Caillebot said, with a strained smile.
Parnasse wasn’t having it.
“You’re only saying that because they had to rip out the old gardens to accommodate the new stalk. The ones put in by your rival. You’d feel differently if you actually had to work there.”
Thalia coughed, deciding it was best not to take sides at this point. Moving a core was hardly routine, but Panoply would have been consulted, and if there had been any technical objection it would not have been permitted.
“I need to see it close up, no matter what the controversies,” she said.
“We’ll be there in no time at all,” Caillebot said, extending a hand back towards the wall where a row of elevator doors stood open.
“Would you like some help with that equipment? It’ll be heavier on the surface.”
“I’ll cope,” Thalia said.
Miracle Bird opened its metal beak and emitted a raucous mechanical chime as it took flight and led the way towards the elevators.
CHAPTER 12
Dreyfus held his breath, still anticipating an attack despite the evidence from the scans. The corvette’s sensors had probed the rock’s embattled surface and revealed no further evidence of active weaponry, although he considered it likely that there were still guns buried in the other hemisphere. The same scans had pinpointed a likely entry point, what appeared to be an airlock leading to some kind of subsurface excavation. The scans could only hint at the depth and extent of the tunnel system. The corvette now lay with its dorsal lock positioned over the surface entry point, separated by only a couple of metres of clear space.
“I can do this alone,” Dreyfus said, ready to push himself through the suitwall.
“We don’t both need to go inside.”
“And I’m not babysitting the corvette while you have all the fun,” Sparver replied.
“All right,” Dreyfus said.
“But understand this: if something happens to one of us down there—whether it’s you or me—the other one gets out of there as fast as he can and concentrates on warning Panoply. Whatever we’re dealing with here, it’s bigger than the life of a single prefect.”
“Message received,” Sparver said.
“See you on the other side.”
Dreyfus pushed himself through the grey surface of the suitwall. As always, he felt ticklish resistance as the suit formed around him, conjured into being from the very fabric of the suitwall. He turned around in time to observe Sparver’s emergence: seeing the edges of the suit blend into the exterior surface of the suitwall and then pucker free. For a moment, the details of Sparver’s suit were blurred and ill-defined, then snapped into sharpness.
The two prefects completed their checks, verifying that their suits were able to talk to each other, and then turned to face the waiting airlock that would allow entry into the rock. Nothing about it surprised Dreyfus, save the fact that it existed in the first place. It was a standard lock, built according to a rugged, inert-matter design. The lock had been hidden before the engagement, tucked away near the base of one of the slug cannons. A concealed shaft must have led down from the surface before the cannons deployed.
There was no need to invoke the manual operating procedure since the lock was still powered and functional. The outer door opened without hesitation, admitting Dreyfus and Sparver to the lock’s air-exchange chamber.
“There’s pressure on the other side,” Sparver said, indicating the standard-format read-out set into the opposite door.
“There’s probably no one inside this thing, but there might be, so we can’t just blow it wide open.”
It was a complication Dreyfus could have done without, but he concurred with his deputy. They would need to seal the door behind them before they advanced further.
“Close the outer door,” Dreyfus said.
The lock finished pressurising. Dreyfus’ suit tasted the air and reported that it was cold but breathable, should the need arise.
He hoped it wouldn’t.
“Stay sharp,” he told Sparver.
“We’re going deeper.”
Dreyfus waited for the inner door to seal itself before moving off. Common lock protocol dictated both inner and outer doors be closed against vacuum unless someone was transitioning through.
“I can’t see a damn thing,” he said, knowing that Sparver’s vision was at least as poor as his own.
“I’m switching on my helmet lamp. We’ll see if that’s a good idea in about two seconds.”
“I’m holding my breath.”
The helmet revealed that they had arrived in a storage area, a repository for tools and replacement machine parts. Dreyfus made out tunnelling gear, some spare airlock components, a couple of racked spacesuits of PreCalvinist design.
“Want to take a guess at how long this junk’s been here?” Sparver said, activating his own lamp.
“Could be ten years, could be two hundred,” Dreyfus said.
“Hard to call.”
“You don’t pressurise a place if you’re planning to mothball it. Waste of air and power.”
“I agree. See anything here that looks like a transmitter, or that might send a signal?”
“No joy.” Sparver nodded his helmet lamp towards the far wall.
“But if I’m not mistaken, that’s a doorway. Think we should take a look-see?”
“We’re not exactly overwhelmed with choices, are we?”
Dreyfus kicked off from the wall and aimed himself at the far doorway, Sparver following just behind. Doubtless the rock’s gravity would eventually have tugged him there, but Dreyfus didn’t have time to wait for that. He reached the doorway and sailed on through into a narrow shaft furnished only with rails and flexible hand-grabs. When the air began to impede his forward drift, he grabbed the nearest handhold and started yanking himself forward. The shaft stretched on far ahead of him, pushing deeper into the heart of the rock. Maybe the shaft had been there for ever, he thought: sunk deep into the rock by prospecting Skyjacks, and someone had just come along and used it serendipitously. But the tunnelling equipment he’d already seen didn’t have the ramshackle, improvised look of Skyjack tools.
He was just pondering that when he caught sight of the end of the shaft.
“I’m slowing down. Watch out behind me.”
Dreyfus reached the bottom and spun through one hundred and eighty degrees to bring his soles into contact with the surface at the base of the shaft. Up and down still had little meaning in the rock’s minimal gravity, but his instincts forced him to orient himself as if his feet were being tugged toward the middle.
He assessed his surroundings as Sparver arrived next to him. They’d come to an intersection with a second shaft that appeared to run horizontally in either direction, curving gently away until it was hidden beyond the limit of the illumination provided by their helmet lamps. The rust-brown tunnel wall was clad with segmented panels, thick braids of pipework and plumbing stapled to the sides. Every now and then the cladding was interrupted by a piece of machinery as rust-brown and ancient-looking as the rest of the tunnel.