‘Oh. How charming. What kinds of game, might I ask?’
‘We’d build simulations to test each other — extraordinarily elaborate worlds filled with subtle dangers and temptations. Mazes and labyrinths; secret passages; trapdoors; dungeons and dragons. We’d spend months inside them, driving each other crazy. Then we’d go away and make them even harder.’
‘But in due course you grew apart,’ the Doctor said. His synthesised voice had a curious piping quality.
‘Yeah,’ Childe said. ‘But we never stopped being friends. It was just that Richard had spent so much time devising increasingly alien scenarios that he’d become more interested in the implied psychologies behind the tests. And I’d become interested only in the playing of the games; not their construction. Unfortunately Richard was no longer there to provide challenges for me.’
‘You were always much better than me at playing them,’ I said. ‘In the end it got too hard to come up with something you’d find difficult. You knew the way my mind worked too well.’
‘He’s convinced that he’s a failure,’ Childe said, turning round to smile at the Doctor.
‘As are we all,’ Trintignant answered. ‘And with some justification, it must be said. I have never been allowed to pursue my admittedly controversial interests to their logical ends. You, Mister Swift, were shunned by those who you felt should have recognised your worth in the field of speculative alien psychology. And you, Mister Childe, have never discovered a challenge worthy of your undoubted talents.’
‘I didn’t think you’d paid me any attention, Doctor.’
‘Nor had I. I have surmised this much since our meeting.’
The volantor dropped below ground level, descending into a brightly lit commercial plaza lined with shops and boutiques. With insouciant ease, Childe skimmed us between aerial walkways and then nosed the car into a dark side-tunnel. He gunned the machine faster, our speed indicated only by the passing of red lights set into the tunnel sides. Now and then another vehicle passed us, but once the tunnel had branched and rebranched half a dozen times, no further traffic appeared. The tunnel lights were gone now and when the volantor’s headlights grazed the walls they revealed ugly cracks and huge, scarred absences of cladding. These old sub-surface ducts dated back to the city’s earliest days, before the domes were thrown across the crater.
Even if I had recognised the part of the city where we had entered the tunnel system, I would have been hopelessly lost by now.
‘Do you think Childe has brought us together to taunt us about our lack of respective failures, Doctor?’ I asked, beginning to feel uneasy again despite my earlier attempts at reassurance.
‘I would consider that a distinct possibility, were Childe himself not conspicuously tainted by the same lack of success.’
‘Then there must be another reason.’
‘Which I’ll reveal in due course,’ Childe said. ‘Just bear with me, will you? You two aren’t the only ones I’ve gathered together.’
Presently we arrived somewhere.
It was a cave in the form of a near-perfect hemisphere, the great domed roof arching a clear three hundred metres from the floor. We were obviously well below Yellowstone’s surface now. It was even possible that we had passed beyond the city’s crater wall, so that above us lay only poisonous skies.
But the domed chamber was inhabited.
The roof was studded with an enormous number of lamps, flooding the interior with synthetic daylight. An island stood in the middle of the chamber, moated by a ring of uninviting water. A single bone-white bridge connected the mainland to the island, shaped like a great curved femur. The island was dominated by a thicket of slender, dark poplars partly concealing a pale structure situated near its middle.
Childe brought the volantor to a rest near the edge of the water and invited us to disembark.
‘Where are we?’ I asked, once I had stepped down.
‘Query the city and find out for yourself,’ Trintignant said.
The result was not what I was expecting. For a moment there was a shocking absence inside my head, the neural equivalent of a sudden, unexpected amputation.
The Doctor’s chuckle was an arpeggio played on a pipe organ. ‘We have been out of range of city services from the moment we entered his conveyance.’
‘You needn’t worry,’ Childe said. ‘You are beyond city services, but only because I value the secrecy of this place. If I imagined it’d have come as a shock to you, I’d have told you already.’
‘I’d have at least appreciated a warning, Roland,’ I said.
‘Would it have changed your mind about coming here?’
‘Conceivably.’
The echo of his laughter betrayed the chamber’s peculiar acoustics. ‘Then are you at all surprised that I didn’t tell you?’
I turned to Trintignant. ‘What about you?’
‘I confess my use of city services has been as limited as your own, but for rather different reasons.’
‘The good Doctor needed to lie low,’ Childe said. ‘That meant he couldn’t participate very actively in city affairs. Not if he didn’t want to be tracked down and assassinated.’
I stamped my feet, beginning to feel cold. ‘Good. What now?’
‘It’s only a short ride to the house,’ Childe said, glancing towards the island.
Now a noise came steadily nearer. It was an antiquated, rumbling sound, accompanied by a odd, rhythmic sort of drumming, quite unlike any machine I had experienced. I looked towards the femoral bridge, suspecting as I did that it was exactly what it looked like: a giant, bio-engineered bone, carved with a flat roadbed. And something was approaching us over the span: a dark, complicated and unfamiliar contraption, which at first glance resembled an iron tarantula.
I felt the back of my neck prickle.
The thing reached the end of the bridge and swerved towards us. Two mechanical black horses provided the motive power. They were emaciated black machines with sinewy, piston-driven limbs, venting steam and snorting from intakes. Malignant red laser-eyes swept over us. The horses were harnessed to a four-wheeled carriage slightly larger than the volantor, above which was perched a headless humanoid robot. Skeletal hands gripped iron control cables which plunged into the backs of the horses’ steel necks.
‘Meant to inspire confidence, is it?’ I asked.
‘It’s an old family heirloom,’ Childe said, swinging open a black door in the side of the carriage. ‘My uncle Giles made automata. Unfortunately — for reasons we’ll come to — he was a bit of a miserable bastard. But don’t let it put you off.’
He helped us aboard, then climbed inside himself, sealed the door and knocked on the roof. I heard the mechanical horses snort; alloy hooves hammered the ground impatiently. Then we were moving, curving around and ascending the gentle arc of the bridge of bone.
‘Have you been here during the entire period of your absence, Mister Childe?’ Trintignant asked.
He nodded. ‘Ever since that family business came up, I’ve allowed myself the occasional visit back to the city — just like I did today — but I’ve tried to keep such excursions to a minimum.’
‘Didn’t you have horns the last time we met?’ I said.
He rubbed the smooth skin of his scalp where the horns had been. ‘Had to have them removed. I couldn’t very well disguise myself otherwise.’
We crossed the bridge and navigated a path between the tall trees which sheltered the island’s structure. Childe’s carriage pulled up to a smart stop in front of the building and I was afforded my first unobstructed view of our destination. It was not one to induce great cheer. The house’s architecture was haphazard: whatever basic symmetry it might once have had was lost under a profusion of additions and modifications. The roof was a jumbled collision of angles and spires, jutting turrets and sinister oubliettes. Not all of the embellishments had been arranged at strict right angles to their neighbours, and the style and apparent age of the house varied jarringly from place to place. Since our arrival in the cave the overhead lights had dimmed, simulating the onset of dusk, but only a few windows were illuminated, clustered together in the left-hand wing. The rest of the house had a forbidding aspect, the paleness of its stone, the irregularity of its construction and the darkness of its many windows suggesting a pile of skulls.