The jewel unfolded before him, undergoing geometric transformations to which he did not dare devote too much attention, for fear that understanding them would cleave his mind open along similar fault lines.
‘Are you sure this is wise?’ Calvin asked, his utterances now more than ever forming part of the normal background of Sylveste’s inner dialogue.
‘It’s too late to return now,’ said a voice.
A voice which belonged neither to Calvin nor Sylveste, but which seemed deeply familiar, as if it had long been a part of him, merely silent.
‘Sun Stealer, isn’t it?’
‘He’s been with us all along,’ Calvin said. ‘Haven’t you?’
‘Longer than you imagine. Since you returned from Lascaille’s Shroud, Dan.’
‘Then everything Khouri said was right,’ he said, while already knowing the truth of it. If Sajaki’s empty suit had not confirmed it, then the revelations he had shared in the white light had ended his doubts, completely.
‘What do you want of me?’
‘Only that you enter the — jewel — as you call it.’ The creature’s voice, and its voice was the only thing that he heard, was sibilant; chillingly so. ‘You have nothing to fear. You will not be harmed by it, nor will you be prevented from leaving.’
‘You would say that, wouldn’t you?’
‘Except that it is the truth.’
‘What about the bridgehead?’
‘The device is still operational. It will remain so until you have left Cerberus.’
‘There’s no way of knowing,’ Calvin said. ‘Whatever he — it — says, could well be a lie. He’s deceived and manipulated us at every step; all to bring you here. Why should he suddenly start telling the truth now?’
‘Because it is of no consequence,’ Sun Stealer said. ‘Now that you have reached this far, your own desires play no further part in the matter.’
And Sylveste felt the suit surge forward, directly into the opened jewel, along a brilliantly faceted, ever-flickering corridor which extended into the structure.
‘What—’ Calvin began.
‘I’m not doing anything,’ Sylveste said. ‘The bastard must have control of my suit!’
‘Stands to reason. He could control Sajaki’s, after all. Must have preferred to sit back and let you do all the work until now. Lazy bastard.’
‘At this point,’ Sylveste said, ‘I don’t think insulting him’s going to make a great deal of difference.’
‘Do you have a better idea?’
‘As a matter of fact—’
The corridor surrounded him completely now, a glowing tracheal tunnel which twisted and turned until it seemed impossible that he could still be inside the jewel. But then, he told himself, he had never come to a clear conclusion as to its true size — it might have been anywhere between a few hundred metres across or tens of kilometres. Its fluctuating shape made it impossible to know, and perhaps meant that there was no meaningful answer; in the same way that one could not specify the volume of a fractal solid.
‘Uh, you were saying?’
‘I was saying…’ Sylveste trailed off. ‘Sun Stealer, are you listening to me?’
‘As always.’
‘I don’t understand why I had to come here. If you managed to animate Sajaki’s suit — and you had conscious control of mine all this time — why did I have to come along in the first place? If there’s something you want inside this thing, something you want to bring out, you could do it without me being here at all.’
‘The device will only respond to organic life. An empty suit would be interpreted as machine sentience.’
‘This — thing — is a device? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘It is an Inhibitor device.’
For a moment the words seemed meaningless, but only for a moment. Then — fuzzily — the words attached to some of the memories he retained from his time in the white light; the portal to the Hades matrix. Those memories attached to others; an endless braid of association.
And he came to a kind of understanding.
More than ever, he knew that he should not continue; that if he reached the inner realm of the jewel — of the Inhibitor device, as he now knew it to be — things would be very, very bad. In fact, it would be difficult to imagine how things could be worse.
‘We can’t go on,’ Calvin said. ‘I understand now what this is.’
‘Me too, belatedly.’
The device had been left here by the Inhibitors. They had placed it in orbit around Hades, next to the glimmering white portal; something older even than the Inhibitors. It did not bother them that they did not properly understand its function, or have any real inkling of who had placed it there, next to the neutron star which — according to some puzzling indications they had allowed to linger unexplored — was not quite as it should be. But, the enigma of its origin aside, it entirely suited their plans. Their own devices were constructed to lure the sentient, and by placing one of them next to an entity even more perplexing, they were guaranteed visitors. It was a strategy they followed across the galaxy, in fact: leaving Inhibitor devices in close proximity to objects of astrophysical interest, or near the ruins of extinct cultures. Anywhere where they were likely to draw attention.
And the Amarantin had come, and tinkered, and made themselves known to the device. It had studied them, and learned their weaknesses.
And it had wiped them out — all except for a handful of descendants of the Banished, who found two means to escape the ruthless predation of the Inhibitors. Some had used the portal itself, mapping themselves into the crustal matrix, where they continued to run as simulations, preserved in the impervious amber of nuclear matter enslaved for computational purposes.
It was hardly living, Sylveste thought, but at least something of them had been preserved.
And then there were the others: the others who had found the other way to escape the Inhibitors. Their mode of escape had been no less drastic, no less irreversible…
‘They became the Shrouders, didn’t they?’ Calvin was speaking now — or was it Sylveste, voicing his own thoughts, the way he sometimes did, in the heat of concentration? He could barely tell, much less care. ‘This was in the last days; when Resurgam was already gone, and most of the spaceborn had already been tracked down and annihilated. One faction went into the Hades matrix. Another learned what they could about manipulating spacetime, probably from the transformations near the portal. And they found a solution; a way to barricade themselves against the Inhibitor weapons. They found a way to wrap spacetime around themselves; a way to curdle and solidify it, until it formed an impervious shell. And they retreated behind those shells and sealed them for eternity.
‘But at least it was better than dying.’
Everything, for an instant, was clear in his head. How those behind the Shrouds had waited, and waited, barely cognisant of the outside universe; barely able to communicate with it, so secure were the walls they had wrapped around themselves.
And they had waited.
They had known, even at the time of enclosure, that the systems left behind by the Inhibitors were slowly failing; slowly losing their ability to suppress intelligence. Not soon enough, for them — but after a million years of waiting, trapped in their bubble of spacetime, they began to wonder if the threat had now diminished…
They could not simply dismantle the Shrouds and look around — far too hazardous; especially as the Inhibitor machines were nothing if not patient. Their apparent silence might only be part of the trap, a waiting game designed to entice the Amarantin — who were now the Shrouders — out of their shells, into the open arena of naked space, where they could be destroyed with ease, terminating the million-year purge against their kind.