‘What is that?’
‘Songspire,’ I said, spinning matter-of-factness around my own creeping unease. ‘Kind of Martian houseplant.’
I’d seen one once, for real, on Earth. Dug out of the Martian bedrock it had grown from over the previous several thousand years and plinthed as a rich man’s objet d’art. Still singing when anything touched it, even the breeze, still giving out the cherry-and-mustard aroma. Not dead, not alive, not anything that could be categorised into a box by human science.
‘How is it attached?’ Wardani wanted to know.
‘Growing out of the wall,’ Sun’s voice came back dented with a by now familiar wonder. ‘Like some kind of coral…’
Wardani stepped back to give herself launch space and reached for the drives on her own grav harness. The quick whine of power-up stung the air.
‘I’m coming up.’
‘Just a moment, Mistress Wardani.’ Hand glided in to crowd her. ‘Sun, is there a way through up there?’
‘No. Whole bubble’s closed.’
‘Then come back down.’ He raised a hand to forestall Wardani. ‘We do not have time for this. Later, if you wish, you may come back while Sun is repairing the buoy. For now, we must find a safe transmission base before anything else.’
A vaguely mutinous expression broke across the archaeologue’s face, but she was too tired to sustain it. She knocked out the grav drivers again – downwhining machine disappointment – and turned away, something muttered and bitten off drifting back over her shoulder, almost as faint as the cherries and mustard from above. She stalked a line away from the Mandrake exec towards the exit. Jiang hesitated a moment in her path, then let her by.
I sighed.
‘Nice going, Hand. She’s the closest thing we’ve got to a native guide in this.’ I gestured around. ‘Place, and you want to piss her off. They teach you that while you were getting your conflict investment doctorate? Upset the experts if you possibly can?’
‘No,’ he said evenly. ‘But they taught me not to waste time.’
‘Right.’ I went after Wardani and caught up just inside the corridor leading out of the chamber. ‘Hey, hold up. Wardani. Wardani, just chill out, will you. Man’s an asshole, what are you going to do?’
‘Fucking merchant.’
‘Well, yeah. That too. But he is the reason we’re here in the first place. Should never underestimate that mercantile drive.’
‘What are you, a fucking economics philosopher now?’
‘I’m.’ I stopped. ‘Listen.’
‘No, I’m through with—’
‘No, listen.’ I held up a hand and pointed down the corridor. ‘There. Hear that?’
‘I don’t hear…’ Her voice trailed off as she caught it. By then, the Carrera’s Wedge neurachem had reeled in the sound for me, so clear there could be no question.
Somewhere down the corridor, something was singing.
Two chambers further on, we found them. A whole bonsai songspire forest, sprouting across the floor and up the lower curve of a corridor neck where it joined the main bubble. The spires seemed to have broken through the primary structure of the vessel from the floor around the join, although there was no sign of damage at their roots. It was as if the hull material had closed around them like healing tissue. The nearest machine was a respectful ten metres off, huddled down the corridor.
The song the spires emitted was closest to the sound of a violin, but played with the infinitely slow drag of individual monofilaments across the bridge and to no melody that I could discern. It was a sound down at the lowest levels of hearing, but each time it swelled, I felt something tugging at the pit of my stomach.
‘The air,’ said Wardani quietly. She had raced me along the bulbous corridors and through the bubble chambers, and now she crouched in front of the spires, out of breath but shiny eyed. ‘There must be convection through here from another level. They only sing on surface contact.’
I shook off an unlooked-for shiver.
‘How old do you reckon they are?’
‘Who knows?’ She got to her feet again. ‘If this was a planetary grav field, I’d say a couple of thousand years at most. But it isn’t.’ She took a step back and shook her head, hand cupping her chin, fingers pressed over her mouth as if to keep in a too-hasty comment. I waited. Finally the hand came away from her face and gestured, hesitant. ‘Look at the branching pattern. They don’t. They don’t usually grow like this. Not this twisted.’
I followed her pointing finger. The tallest of the spires stood about chest high, spindly reddish black stone limbs snaking out of the central trunk in a profusion that did seem more exuberant and intricate than the growth I’d seen on the plinthed specimen back on earth. Surrounding it, other, smaller spires emulated the pattern, except that—
The rest of the party caught up, Deprez and Hand in the van.
‘Where the hell have you. Oh.’
The faint singing from the spires crept up an almost imperceptible increment. Air currents stirred by the movement of bodies across the chamber. I felt a slight dryness in my throat at the sound it made.
‘I’m just looking at these, if that’s OK, Hand.’
‘Mistress Wardani—’
I shot the exec a warning glance.
Deprez came up beside the archaeologue. ‘Are they dangerous?’
‘I don’t know. Ordinarily, no, but—’
The thing that had been scratching for attention at the threshold of my consciousness suddenly emerged.
‘They’re growing towards each other. Look at the branches on the smaller ones. They all reach up and out. The taller ones branch in all directions.’
‘That suggests communication of some sort. An integrated, self relating system.’ Sun walked round the cluster of spires, scanning with the emissions tracer on her arm. ‘Though, hmm.’
‘You won’t find any radiation,’ said Wardani, almost dreamily. ‘They suck it in like sponges. Total absorption of everything except red wave light. According to mineral composition, the surface of these things shouldn’t be red at all. They ought to reflect right across the spectrum.’
‘But they don’t.’ Hand made it sound as if he was thinking of having the spires detained for the transgression. ‘Why is that, Mistress Wardani?’
‘If I knew that, I’d be a Guild President by now. We know less about songspires than practically any other aspect of the Martian biosphere. In fact, we don’t even know if you can rank them in the biosphere.’
‘They grow, don’t they?’
I saw Wardani sneer. ‘So do crystals. That doesn’t make them alive.’
‘I don’t know about the rest of you,’ said Ameli Vongsavath, skirting the songspires with her Sunjet cocked at a semi-aggressive angle. ‘But this looks to me like an infestation.’
‘Or art,’ murmured Deprez. ‘How would we know?’
Vongsavath shook her head. ‘This is a ship, Luc. You don’t put your corridor art where you’ll trip over it every time you walk through. Look at these things. They’re all over the place.’
‘And if you can fly through?’
‘They’d still get in the way.’
‘Collision Art,’ suggested Schneider with a smirk.
‘Alright, that’s enough.’ Hand waved himself some space between the spires and their new audience. Faint notes awoke as the motion brushed air currents against the red stone branches. The musk in the air thickened. ‘We do not have—’
‘Time for this,’ droned Wardani. ‘We must find a safe transmission base.’
Schneider guffawed. I bit back a grin and avoided looking in Deprez’s direction. I suspected that Hand’s control was crumbling and I wasn’t keen to push him over the edge at this point. I still wasn’t sure what he’d do when he snapped.