But the maggot did not seem particularly frightened by the newcomers. It simply halted and waved its ghostly tendrils in their direction. The thing’s pale pink segmented body blushed a deeper shade of red, and then an arterial red secretion oozed from between the segments, forming a fresh scarlet puddle beneath it. Then the puddle extended tendrils of its own, creeping forward as if running downhill. Sky felt his sense of what was vertical shift dizzyingly, as if there had been a local change in the direction of gravity. The red fluid trickled towards them like a scarlet tide, and then it was flowing up and around their suits. For a moment Sky felt that he had been turned upside down, and he was falling. The red veil passed over his faceplate, as if seeking a way into his suit. Then it passed.
Gravity returned to normal. Breathing hard, still terrified, he watched the puddle of red return to the maggot and then seep back into the creature. The maggot was red for a moment, then the blush slowly faded back to pink.
Then the maggot did something very odd, not turning itself in the shaft, but reversing itself; the tendrils retracting into the body at one end and popping out the other. The creature undulated back into the shaft’s yellow depths. It was as if nothing at all had happened.
Then a voice spoke to them. It boomed through the walls at Godlike volume, and it sounded too deep to be human.
‘It’s good to have some company,’ it said, in Portuguese.
‘Who are you?’ Sky said.
‘Lago. Come and see me, please; it isn’t very far now.’
‘And what if we choose to leave you?’
‘I’ll be sad, but I won’t stop you.’
The reverberations of the Godlike voice died down, all as it had been before the maggot had arrived. The two of them were breathing hard, as if they had just been sprinting. Long moments passed before Norquinco spoke. ‘We’re going back to the shuttle. Now.’
‘No. We’re going onwards, just as we told Lago we would.’
Norquinco gripped Sky’s arm. ‘No! This is insanity. Did you just erase what happened from your short-term memory?’
‘We were invited further into the ship by something which could already have killed us if it had that in mind.’
‘Something which called itself Lago. Even though Oliveira…’
‘Didn’t actually say that Lago was dead.’ Sky fought to hold the fear from his voice. ‘Just that something had happened to him. Personally, I’m interested in finding out what that something was. And also anything else this ship, or whatever it is, might be able to tell us.’
‘Fine. Then go ahead. I’m going back.’
‘No. You’re staying here, coming with me.’
Norquinco hesitated before answering. ‘You can’t force me.’
‘No, but I can certainly make it worth your while.’ Now it was Sky’s turn to place his hand on the other man’s arm. ‘Use your imagination, Norquinco. There must be things here that could shatter every paradigm we’ve ever recognised. At the very least there must be things here that can get us to Journey’s End ahead of the other ships, perhaps even give us a tactical advantage when they arrive behind us and start contesting territorial rights.’
‘You’re aboard an alien spacecraft and all you can think of is petty human issues like squabbles over land rights?’
‘Believe me, those things won’t seem so petty in a few years.’ He grasped Norquinco’s arm even tighter, feeling the layers of suit fabric compress beneath his grip. ‘Think, man! Everything could stem from this one moment. Our whole history could be shaped by what happens here and now. We aren’t small players, Norquinco; we’re colossi. Grasp that, just for a instant. And start thinking of the kinds of rewards that come to men who make history happen. Men like us.’ He thought back to the Santiago; of the hidden room where he kept the Chimeric infiltrator. ‘I’ve already made longterm plans, Norquinco. My safety is guaranteed on Journey’s End, even if events turn against us. If that should happen, I’d also arrange for your own safety, your own security. And if things didn’t turn against us, I could make you a very powerful man indeed.’
‘And if I should turn around now, and go back to the shuttle?’
‘I wouldn’t hold it against you,’ Sky said softly. ‘This is a terrifying place, after all. But I wouldn’t guarantee you any sanctuary in the years that lie ahead.’
Norquinco dislodged Sky’s grip from his arm, looking away until he had found his answer. ‘All right. We go on. But we don’t spend more than an hour in this place.’
Sky nodded, though the gesture was wasted. ‘I’m pleased, Norquinco. I knew you were a man who’d see sense.’
They advanced. The going became easier now, as if the shaft was always sloping downwards — it hardly required any effort at all to slither down it. Sky thought of the way the red fluid had moved around him. The local control of gravity was so precise that the fluid had looked alive, flowing like a vastly accelerated slime mould. The creatures that had built the ship had learned to do far more than alter the Higgs field. They could play it like a piano.
Whatever they are, he thought — whether they were all like the maggot — they had to be millions of years in advance of humanity. The Flotilla must seem inexpressibly primitive to them. Perhaps they had not even been sure it was the product of intelligent thinking at all. And yet it had interested them.
The shaft opened out into a huge, smooth-walled cavern. They had emerged a little way up the side of one of its scalloped walls, but the place was so thick with cloying vapour that it was difficult to see the other side. The chamber was bathed in foetid yellow light and the floor was hidden beneath an enormous lake of red fluid which must have been many metres deep. There were dozens of maggots in the lake, some of them almost completely submerged. Many of them were of slightly different sizes and shapes to the one they had seen so far. Some were much larger than a man, and their end-tendrils included specialised appendages and, perhaps, sensory organs. One in particular was looking at Sky and Norquinco now, with a single human-looking eye on the end of a stalk. But by far the largest maggot sat in the middle of the lake, its pale pink body rising metres from the water; tens of metres long. It turned the end of its body towards them, a small crown of tendrils waving frondlike in the air.
There was a mouth beneath the frond; absurdly small against the size of the maggot. It was human in shape, fringed in red, and when it spoke — emitting an immense, booming voice — it formed human sound shapes.
‘Hello,’ it said. ‘I’m Lago.’
I held the vial up to the light for a moment before slipping it into the breach. The way the red fluid twinkled, the way it flowed sluggishly one moment and then with blinding speed the next… it reminded me far too much of the red lake at the heart of the Caleuche. Except that there never was a Caleuche, was there? Just something much stranger, to which the ghost ship myth had attached itself like a parasite. And hadn’t that memory of Sky’s always been there, at the back of my mind? I had recognised Dream Fuel from almost the moment I saw it.
There was enough in that red lake to drown in, I thought.
I slammed the wedding gun against my neck and pushed the Fuel into my carotid artery. There was no rush; no hallucinogenic transition. Fuel was not a drug in that sense; it acted globally across the brain rather than hitting any single region. It wanted only to arrest cellular decay and to repair recent damage; bringing memories back into focus and re-establishing connective pathways that had recently been broken. It seemed to tap into a recent map of what had been, as if the body carried a lingering field which changed more slowly than the cellular patterns themselves. That was why Fuel was able to fix both injuries and memories just as easily, without the drug itself knowing anything about physiology or neuro-anatomy.