‘Quality shit,’ Ratko said. ‘I only use the best myself, man.’
‘Then you’re saying that not everything that comes out of here is as good?’ Zebra asked.
‘Hey, like I said. One for Gideon.’
Ratko led the three of us along a series of twisting, makeshift tunnels. They had been equipped with lights and a rudimentary floor, but they were more or less bored through solid rock. It was as if the complex had been tunnelled back into the chasm wall.
‘I keep hearing rumours,’ I said. ‘About Gideon’s health. Some people think that’s why he’s letting the cheap stuff hit the streets. Because he’s too ill to manage his own lines of supply.’
I hoped I had not said anything which would betray my ignorance of the true situation. But Ratko just said, ‘Gideon’s still producing. That’s all that matters right now.’
‘I won’t know until I see him, will I?’
‘He’s not a pretty sight, I hope you realise.’
I smiled. ‘Word gets around.’
THIRTY-SIX
While Ratko was leading us towards Gideon I allowed the next episode to happen. That was how it seemed, anyway: that now it was up to me when it happened, as if it were simply a case of digging through three-hundred-year-old memories, sorting them into something like chronological order and letting the next lot flood my mind. There was nothing jarringly unfamiliar about it any more. It was as if I half knew exactly what was going to happen, but just hadn’t given the matter much recent thought, like a book I hadn’t opened in a long time, but whose story could never completely surprise me.
Sky and Norquinco were climbing down from the shaft where they had emerged, negotiating the chamber’s slippery, scalloped sides until they were standing near the shore of the red lake.
The maggot which rested in the lake, tens of metres away, had just introduced itself as Lago.
Sky steeled himself. He felt a tremendous sense of fear and strangeness, but he was convinced that it was his destiny to survive this place.
‘Lago?’ he said. ‘I don’t know. From what I gather, Lago was a man.’
‘I’m also that which existed before Lago.’ The voice, though loud, was calm and strangely lacking in menace. ‘This is difficult to say through Lago’s language. I am Lago, but I am also Travelling Fearlessly.’
‘What happened to Lago?’
‘That’s also not easy. Excuse me.’ There was a pause while gallons of red fluid gushed out of the maggot into the lake, and then gallons more flowed up into the maggot. ‘That’s better. Much better. Let me explain. Before Lago there was just Travelling Fearlessly, and Travelling Fearlessly’s helper grubs, and the void warren.’ The tendrils seemed to point out the cavern’s sides and ceiling. ‘But then the void warren was damaged, and many poor helper grubs had to be… there isn’t any word in Lago’s mind for this. Broken down? Dissolved? Degraded? But not lost fully.’
Sky looked at Norquinco, who had not said a word since entering the chamber. ‘What happened before your ship was damaged?’
‘Yes — ship. That’s it. Not void warren. Ship. Much better.’ The mouth smiled horribly and more red fluid rained out of the creature. ‘It’s a long time ago.’
‘Start at the beginning. Why were you following us?’
‘Us?’
‘The Flotilla. The five other ships. Five other void warrens.’ Despite his fear, he felt anger. ‘Christ, it’s not that difficult.’ Sky held up his fist and opened his fingers one at a time. ‘One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Understand? Five. There were five other void warrens, built by us — by people like Lago — and you chose to follow us. I’d like to know why.’
‘That was before the damage. After the damage, there were only four other void warrens.’
Sky nodded. So it understood something of what had happened to the Islamabad, anyway. ‘Meaning you don’t remember it as well?’
‘Not very well, no.’
‘Well, do your best. Where did you come from? What made you latch onto our Flotilla?’
‘There’ve been too many voids. Too many for Travelling Fearlessly to remember all the way back.’
‘You don’t have to remember all the way back. Just tell me how you got where you did.’
‘There was a time when there were just grubs, even though there had been many voids. We looked for other types of grub but didn’t find any.’ Meaning, Sky assumed, that there had been a time when Travelling Fearlessly’s people had crossed space, but not encountered any other form of intelligence.
‘How long ago was this?’
‘Ages ago. One and a half turns.’
Sky felt a chill of cosmic awe. Perhaps he was wrong, but he strongly suspected that the maggot was talking about rotations of the Milky Way; the time taken for a typical star at the current distance from the galactic centre to make one complete orbit. Each of those orbits would take more than two hundred million years… meaning that the grub’s racial memory — if that was what it was — encompassed more than three hundred million years of space travel. The dinosaurs had not even been a sketch on the evolutionary drawing board three hundred million years ago. It was a span of time that made humans, and everything humans had done, seem like a layer of dust on the summit of a mountain.
‘Tell me the rest.’
‘Then we did find other grubs. But they weren’t like us. Not like grubs at all, really. They didn’t want to… tolerate us. They were like a void warren but… empty. Just the void warren.’
A ship with no living things aboard it.
‘Machine intelligences?’
The mouth smiled again. It was quite obscene, really. ‘Yes. Machine intelligences. Hungry machines. Machines that eat grubs. Machines that eat us.’
Machines that eat us.
I thought of the way the maggot had said that; as if all it amounted to was a mildly irritating aspect of reality; something that had to be endured but which could not really be blamed upon anyone. I remembered my revulsion at the thought of the maggot’s defeatist mode of thinking.
No — not my revulsion, I told myself. Sky Haussmann’s.
I was right — wasn’t I?
Ratko led the three of us through the crudely excavated tunnels of the Dream Fuel factory. Now and then we passed through widened chambers, dimly lit, where workers in glossy grey coats leaned over benches so densely covered with chemical equipment that they resembled miniature glass cities. There were enormous retorts filled with litres of dark, twinkling blood-red Dream Fuel. At the very end of the production line, neat racks of filled vials waited ready for distribution. Many of the workers had goggles like those worn by Ratko, specialised lenses clicking and whirring into place for each task in the production process.
‘Where are you taking us?’ I said.
‘You wanted a drink, didn’t you?’
Quirrenbach whispered, ‘He’s taking us to see the man, I think. The man runs all this, so don’t underestimate him — even if he does have quite an unusual belief system.’
‘Gideon?’ Zebra asked.
‘Well, that’s part of it,’ Ratko said, obviously misunderstanding her.