The door to Felka’s quarters was shut, but Skade had the authority to enter any part of the ship. She knocked politely nonetheless, and waited five or six seconds before entering.
Felka. What are you doing?
Felka was on the floor, sitting down cross-legged. She appeared calm, nothing in her composure betraying the increased effort of performing virtually any activity under three gees. She wore thin black pyjamas that made her look very pale and childlike to Skade.
She had surrounded herself with small white rectangles, many dozens of them, each of which was marked with a particular set of symbols. Skade saw reds and blacks and yellows. The rectangles were something she had encountered before, but she could not remember where. They were arrayed in excessively neat arcs and spokes, radiating out from Felka. Felka was moving them from place to place, as if exploring the permutations of some immense abstract structure.
Skade bent down, picking up one of the rectangles. It was a piece of glossy white card or plastic, printed on one side only. The other side was perfectly blank.
I recognise these. It’s a game they play in Chasm City. There are fifty-two cards in a set, thirteen cards for each symbol, just as there are thirteen hours on a Yellowstone clock face.
Skade put the card back where she had found it. Felka continued rearranging the cards for some minutes. Skade waited, listening to the slick sound that the cards made as they passed across each other.
‘Its origins are a bit older than that,’ Felka said.
But I’m right, aren’t I? They do play this there.
‘There are many games, Skade. This is just one of them.’
Where did you find the cards?
‘I had the ship make them. I remembered the numbers.’
And the patterns? Skade selected another card, this one marked with a bearded figure. This man looks like Clavain.
‘It’s just a King,’ Felka said dismissively. ‘I remembered the patterns as well.’
Skade examined another: a long-necked, regal-looking woman dressed in something that resembled ceremonial armour. She could almost be me.
‘She’s the Queen.’
Why, Felka? What precisely is the point of this? Skade stood again and gestured at the configuration of cards. The number of permutations must be finite. Your only opponent is blind chance. I don’t see the attraction.
‘You probably wouldn’t.’
Again Skade heard the slick rasp of card on card. What is the objective, Felka?
‘To maintain order.’
Skade barked out a short laugh. Then there is no end-state?
‘This isn’t a problem in computation, Skade. The means is the end.
The game has no halting state other than failure.’ Felka bit her tongue, like a child working on some particularly tortuous piece of colouring-in. In a flurry of movement she moved six cards, dramatically altering the larger pattern in a way Skade would have sworn was not possible a moment earlier.
Skade nodded, understanding. This is the Great Wall of Mars, isn’t it?
Felka looked up, but said nothing before resuming her work.
Skade knew that she was right: that the game she saw Felka playing here, if indeed it could be called a game, was only a surrogate for the Wall itself. The Wall had been destroyed four hundred years earlier, and yet it had played such a vital part in Felka’s childhood that she regressed towards her memories of it at the slightest sign of external stress.
Skade felt anger. She knelt down again and destroyed the pattern of cards. Felka froze, her hand hovering above the space where a card had been. She looked at Skade, incomprehension on her face.
As was sometimes the case with Felka, she framed her question as a flat, uninflected statement. ‘Why.’
Listen to me, Felka. You must not do this. You are one of us now. You cannot retreat back into your childhood just because Clavain isn’t here any more.
Pathetically, Felka tried to regather the cards. But Skade reached out and grabbed her hand.
No. Stop this, Felka. You cannot regress. I won’t allow it. Skade tilted Felka’s head towards her own. This is about more than just Clavain, Felka. I know that he means something to you. But the Mother Nest means more. Clavain was always an outsider. But you are one of us, to the marrow. We need you, Felka. As you are now, not as you were.
But when she released her hold, Felka only looked down. Skade stood up and backed away from the cross-legged figure. She had committed a cruel act, she knew. But it was no less than Clavain would have done, had he caught Felka retreating back into her childhood. The Wall was a mindless God to worship, and it sucked her soul into itself, even in memory.
Felka began to lay the cards back down again.
She pushed Galiana’s casket through the empty warrens of Nightshade . Her armour moved in measured, funereal steps, one cautious pace at a time. With each clangorous footfall, Skade heard the whining of gyroscopes struggling to maintain balance under the new acceleration. The weight of her own skull was a cruel compressive force squeezing down on the upper vertebrae of her truncated spine. Her tongue was an unresponsive mass of sluggish muscle. Her face looked different, the skin tugged down from her cheekbones as if by invisible guylines. Slight distortion of the visual field revealed the effect of the gravity on her eyeballs.
Only one-quarter of the ship’s mass remained now. The rest was being suppressed by the field, the bubble of which had now swallowed up half the ship’s length from the stern towards the midpoint.
They were sustaining four gees.
Skade seldom went into the bubble itself now: the physiological effects, even though buffered by the mechanisms of her armour, were simply too uncomfortable. The bubble lacked a sharply defined edge, but the effects of the field fell off so sharply that they were almost immeasurably small beyond the nominal boundary. The field geometry was not spherically symmetrical, either: there were occlusions and hairpins within it, ventricles and fissures where the effect dropped or rose in interplay with other variables. The strange topology of the machinery itself imposed its own structure on the field, too. When the machinery moved, as it was obliged to, the field changed as well. At other times it seemed to be the field that was making the machinery move. Her technicians only pretended that they understood all that was happening. What they had was a set of rules that told them what would happen under certain conditions. But those rules were valid only in a narrow range of states. They had been happy suppressing half of the ship’s mass, but were much less so now. Occasionally, the delicate quantum-field instrumentation that the techs had positioned elsewhere in the ship registered excursions of the bubble as it momentarily swelled and contracted, engulfing the entire ship. Skade convinced herself that she felt those instants, even though they lasted much less than a microsecond. At two gees of suppression, the excursions had been rare. Now they happened three or four times a day.
Skade wheeled the casket into an elevator and rode downship, towards the bubble boundary. She could see the undercurve of Galiana’s jaw through the casket’s viewing window. Her expression was one of infinite calm and composure. Skade was very glad that she had had the presence of mind to bring Galiana with her, even when the mission’s sole scope had been stopping Clavain. At the back of her mind even then she must have suspected that they might have to turn into interstellar space, and that at some point it would be necessary to seek Galiana’s dangerous advice. It had cost her nothing to bring the woman’s frozen corpse aboard; now all she needed was the nerve to consult it.