I studied its contents.
There was a reefersleep casket of the kind Forqueray and his ilk used aboard their ships, attended by numerous complicated hunks of gleaming green support machinery. By use of such a casket, one might prolong the four hundred-odd years of a normal human lifespan by many centuries, though reefersleep was not without its risks.
‘I spent a century and a half in that contraption,’ he said, ‘waking every fifteen or twenty years whenever a report trickled in from one of the envoys. Waking is the worst part. It feels like you’re made of glass; as if the next movement you make — the next breath you take — will cause you to shatter into a billion pieces. It always passes, and you always forget it an hour later, but it’s never easier the next time.’ He shuddered visibly. ‘In fact, sometimes I think it gets harder each time.’
‘Then your equipment needs servicing,’ Forqueray said dismissively. I suspected it was bluff. Ultras often wore a lock of braided hair for every crossing they had made across interstellar space and survived all the myriad misfortunes which might befall a ship. But that braid also symbolised every occasion on which they had been woken from the dead, at the end of the journey.
They felt the pain as fully as Childe did, even if they were not willing to admit it.
‘How long did you spend awake each time?’ I asked.
‘No more than thirteen hours. That was usually sufficient to tell if the message was interesting or not. I’d allow myself one or two hours to catch up on the news; what was going on in the wider universe. But I had to be disciplined. If I’d stayed awake longer, the attraction of returning to city life would have become overwhelming. That room began to feel like a prison.’
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Surely the subjective time must have passed very quickly?’
‘You’ve obviously never spent any time in reefersleep, Richard. There’s no consciousness when you’re frozen, granted — but the transitions to and from the cold state are like an eternity, crammed with strange dreams.’
‘But you hoped the rewards would be worth it?’
Childe nodded. ‘And, indeed, they may well have been. I was last woken six months ago, and I’ve not returned to the chamber since. Instead, I’ve spent that time gathering together the resources and the people for a highly unusual expedition.’
Now he made the table change its projection, zooming in on one particular star.
‘I won’t bore you with catalogue numbers, suffice to say that this is a system which no one around this table — with the possible exception of Forqueray — is likely to have heard of. There’ve never been any human colonies there, and no crewed vessel has ever passed within three light-years of it. At least, not until recently.’
The view zoomed in again, enlarging with dizzying speed.
A planet swelled up to the size of a skull, suspended above the table.
It was hued entirely in shades of grey and pale rust, cratered and gouged here and there by impacts and what must have been very ancient weathering processes. Though there was a suggestion of a wisp of atmosphere — a smoky blue halo encircling the planet — and though there were icecaps at either pole, the world looked neither habitable nor inviting.
‘Cheerful-looking place, isn’t it?’ Childe said. ‘I call it Golgotha.’
‘Nice name,’ Celestine said.
‘But not, unfortunately, a very nice planet.’ Childe made the view enlarge again, so that we were skimming the world’s bleak, apparently lifeless surface. ‘Pretty dismal, to be honest. It’s about the same size as Yellowstone, receiving about the same amount of sunlight from its star. Doesn’t have a moon. Surface gravity’s close enough to one gee that you won’t know the difference once you’re suited up. A thin carbon dioxide atmosphere, and no sign that anything’s ever evolved there. Plenty of radiation hitting the surface, but that’s about your only hazard, and one we can easily deal with. Golgotha’s tectonically dead, and there haven’t been any large impacts on her surface for a few million years.’
‘Sounds boring,’ Hirz said.
‘And it very probably is, but that isn’t the point. You see, there’s something on Golgotha.’
‘What kind of something?’ Celestine asked.
‘That kind,’ Childe said.
It came over the horizon.
It was tall and dark, its details indistinct. That first view of it was like the first glimpse of a cathedral’s spire through morning fog. It tapered as it rose, constricting to a thin neck before flaring out again into a bulb-shaped finial, which in turn tapered to a needle-sharp point.
Though it was impossible to say how large the thing was, or what it was made of, it was very obviously a structure, as opposed to a peculiar biological or mineral formation. On Grand Teton, vast numbers of tiny single-celled organisms conspired to produce the slime towers which were that world’s most famous natural feature, and while those towers reached impressive heights and were often strangely shaped, they were unmistakably the products of unthinking biological processes rather than conscious design. The structure on Golgotha was too symmetric for that, and entirely too solitary. If it had been a living thing, I would have expected to see others like it, with evidence of a supporting ecology of different organisms.
Even if it were a fossil, millions of years dead, I could not believe that there would be just one on the whole planet.
No. The thing had most definitely been put there.
‘A structure?’ I asked Childe.
‘Yes. Or a machine. It isn’t easy to decide.’ He smiled. ‘I call it Blood Spire. Almost looks innocent, doesn’t it? Until you look closer.’
We spun round the Spire, or whatever it was, viewing it from all directions. Now that we were closer, it was clear that the thing’s surface was densely detailed; patterned and textured with geometrically complex forms, around which snaked intestinal tubes and branching, veinlike bulges. The effect was to undermine my earlier certainty that the thing was non-biological.
Now it looked like some sinewy fusion of animal and machine: something that might have appealed in its grotesquerie to Childe’s demented uncle.
‘How tall is it?’ I asked.
‘Two hundred and fifty metres,’ Childe said.
I saw that now there were tiny glints on Golgotha’s surface, almost like metallic flakes which had fallen from the side of the structure.
‘What are those?’ I asked.
‘Why don’t I show you?’ Childe said.
He enlarged the view still further, until the glints resolved into distinct shapes.
They were people.
Or — more accurately — the remains of what had once been people. It was impossible to say how many there had been. All had been mutilated in some fashion: crushed or pruned or bisected; the tattered ruins of their spacesuits were still visible in one or two places. Severed parts accompanied the bodies, often several tens of metres from the rightful owner.
It was as if they had been flung away in a fit of temper.
‘Who were they?’ Forqueray asked.
‘A crew who happened to slow down in this system to make shield repairs,’ Childe said. ‘Their captain was called Argyle. They chanced upon the Spire and started exploring it, believing it to contain something of immense technological value.’
‘And what happened to them?’
‘They went inside in small teams, sometimes alone. Inside the Spire they passed through a series of challenges, each of which was harder than the last. If they made a mistake, the Spire punished them. The punishments were initially mild, but they became steadily more brutal. The trick was to know when to admit defeat.’
I leaned forward. ‘How do you know all this?’