She struggled — cartwheeling her arms, her feet skidding against the floor — but it was no good. She started shouting, and then screaming.
I reached the door.
My hand hesitated over the markings. Was I remembering accurately, or had Celestine intended to press a different solution? They all looked so similar now.
Then Celestine, who was still clutching her ruined arm, nodded emphatically.
I palmed the door.
I stared at it, willing it to move. After all this, what if her choice had been wrong? The Spire seemed to draw out the moment sadistically while behind me I continued to hear the frantic hissing of the whirling cable. And something else, which I preferred not to think about.
Suddenly the noise stopped.
In my peripheral vision I saw the cable retreating into the wall, like a snake’s tongue laden with scent.
Before me, the door began to open.
Celestine’s choice had been correct. I examined my state of mind and decided that I ought to be feeling relief. And perhaps, distantly, I did. At least now we would have a clear route back out of the Spire. But we would not be going forward, and I knew not all of us would be leaving.
I turned around, steeling myself against what I was about to see.
Childe and Trintignant were undamaged.
Celestine was already attending to her injury, fixing a tourniquet from her medical kit above the point where her arm ended. She had lost very little blood, and did not appear to be in very much discomfort.
‘Are you all right?’ I said.
‘I’ll make it out, Richard.’ She grimaced, tugging the tourniquet tighter. ‘Which is more than can be said for Hirz.’
‘Where is she?’
‘It got her.’
With her good hand, Celestine pointed to the place where the whirl had been only moments before. On the floor — just below the volume of air where the cable had hovered and thrashed — lay a small, neat pile of flailed human tissue.
‘There’s no sign of Celestine’s hand,’ I said. ‘Or Hirz’s suit.’
‘It pulled her apart,’ Childe said, his face drained of blood.
‘Where is she?’
‘It was very fast. There was just a… blur. It pulled her apart and then the parts disappeared into the walls. I don’t think she could have felt much.’
‘I hope to God she didn’t.’
Doctor Trintignant stooped down and examined the pieces.
EIGHT
Outside, in the long, steely-shadowed light of what was either dusk or dawn, we found the pieces of Hirz for which the Spire had had no use.
They were half-buried in dust, like the bluffs and arches of some ancient landscape rendered in miniature. My mind played gruesome tricks with the shapes, turning them from brutally detached pieces of human anatomy into abstract sculptures: jointed formations that caught the light in a certain way and cast their own pleasing shadows. Though some pieces of fabric remained, the Spire had retained all the metallic parts of her suit for itself. Even her skull had been cracked open and sucked dry, so that the Spire could winnow the few small precious pieces of metal she carried in her head.
And what it could not use, it had thrown away.
‘We can’t just leave her here,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to do something, bury her… at least put up some kind of marker.’
‘She’s already got one,’ Childe said.
‘What?’
‘The Spire. And the sooner we get back to the shuttle, the sooner we can fix Celestine and get back to it.’
‘A moment, please,’ Trintignant said, fingering through another pile of human remains.
‘Those aren’t anything to do with Hirz,’ Childe said.
Trintignant rose to his feet, slipping something into his suit’s utility belt pocket in the process.
Whatever it had been was small; no larger than a marble or small stone.
‘I’m going home,’ Celestine said, when we were back in the safety of the shuttle. ‘And before you try and talk me out of it, that’s final.’
We were alone in her quarters. Childe had just given up trying to convince her to stay, but he had sent me in to see if I could be more persuasive. My heart, however, was not in it. I had seen what the Spire could do, and I was damned if I was going to be responsible for any blood other than my own.
‘At least let Trintignant take care of your hand,’ I said.
‘I don’t need steel now,’ she said, stroking the glistening blue surgical sleeve which terminated her arm. ‘I can manage without a hand until we’re back in Chasm City. They can grow me a new one while I’m sleeping.’
The Doctor’s musical voice interrupted us, Trintignant’s impassive silver mask poking through into Celestine’s bubbletent partition. ‘If I may be so bold… it may be that my services are the best you can now reasonably hope to attain.’
Celestine looked at Childe, and then at the Doctor, and then at the glistening surgical sleeve.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Nothing. Only some news from home which Childe has allowed me to see.’ Uninvited, Trintignant stepped fully into the room and sealed the partition behind him.
‘What, Doctor?’
‘Rather disturbing news, as it happens. Not long after our departure, something upsetting happened to Chasm City. A blight which afflicted everything contingent upon any microscopic, self-replicating system. Nanotechnology, in other words. I gather the fatalities were numbered in the millions…’
‘You don’t have to sound so bloody cheerful about it.’
Trintignant navigated to the side of the couch where Celestine was resting. ‘I merely stress the point that what we consider state-of-the-art medicine may be somewhat beyond the city’s present capabilities. Of course, much may change before our return…’
‘Then I’ll just have to take that risk, won’t I?’ Celestine said.
‘On your own head be it.’ Trintignant paused and placed something small and hard on Celestine’s table. Then he turned as if to leave, but stopped and spoke again. ‘I am accustomed to it, you know.’
‘Accustomed to what?’ I said.
‘Fear and revulsion. Because of what I have become, and what I have done. But I am not an evil man. Perverse, yes. Given to peculiar desires, most certainly. But emphatically not a monster.’
‘What about your victims, Doctor?’
‘I have always maintained that they gave consent for the procedures I inflicted -’ he corrected himself ‘- performed upon them.’
‘That’s not what the records say.’
‘And who are we to argue with records?’ The light played on his mask in such a fashion as to enhance the half-smile that was always there. ‘Who are we, indeed.’
When Trintignant was gone, I turned to Celestine and said, ‘I’m going back into the Spire. You realise that, don’t you?’
‘I’d guessed, but I still hope I can talk you out of it.’ With her good hand, she fingered the small, hard thing Trintignant had placed on the table. It looked like a misshapen dark stone — whatever the Doctor had found amongst the dead — and for a moment I wondered why he had left it behind.
Then I said, ‘I really don’t think there’s much point. It’s between me and Childe now. He must have known that there’d come a point when I wouldn’t be able to turn away.’
‘No matter what the costs?’ Celestine asked.
‘Nothing’s without a little risk.’
She shook her head, slowly and wonderingly. ‘He really got to you, didn’t he.’
‘No,’ I said, feeling a perverse need to defend my old friend, even when I knew that what Celestine said was perfectly true. ‘It wasn’t Childe, in the end. It was the Spire.’