‘Telni, don’t,’ Mina called.
The boy said tremulously, ‘Already you have done good and insightful work, which—’
Telni struck, a hard clap with his open hand to the side of the boy’s head. Powpy went down squealing.
Mina rushed forward and pushed herself between Telni and the boy. ‘What have you done?’
‘He, it – all my life—’
‘Is that this boy’s fault? Oh, get away, you fool.’ She knelt down and cradled the child’s head on her lap. With the umbilical still dangling from the back of his neck, Powpy was crying, in a strange, contained way. ‘He’s going to bruise. I think you may have damaged his ear. And his jaw – no, child, don’t try to talk.’ She turned to the Weapon, which hovered impassively. ‘Don’t make him speak for you again. He’s hurt.’
Telni opened his hands. ‘Mina, please—’
‘Are you still here?’ she snarled. ‘Go get help. Or if you can’t do that, just go away. Go!’
And he knew he had lost her, in that one moment, with that one foolish blow. He turned away and headed towards the Platform’s hospital to find a nurse.
He would not see the Weapon again for two decades.
The little boy walked into Telni’s cell, trailing a silvery rope from the back of his neck.
Telni was huddled up in his bunk, a spindling-skin blanket over his body. Though feverish, Telni was shivering: drying out from the drink, and not for the first time. He scowled at the boy. ‘You again.’
‘Be fair,’ the boy said. ‘We have not troubled you for twenty years.’
‘Not twenty for you.’ His figuring was cloudy. ‘Down on Lowland, less than a year—’
‘This boy is not yet healed.’
Telni saw the boy’s face was distorted on the right-hand side. ‘I apologise.’ He sat up. ‘I apologise to you – what in the blue was your name?’
‘Powpy.’
‘I apologise to you, Powpy. Not to the thing that controls you. Where is it, by the way?’
‘It would not fit through the door.’
Telni lay back and laughed.
‘We did not expect to find you here.’
‘In the drunk tank? Well, I got fired by the apothecary for emptying her drugs cabinet once too often. So it was the drink for me.’ He patted his belly. ‘At least it’s putting fat on my bones.’
‘Why this slow self-destruction?’
‘Call it an experiment. I’m following in my father’s footsteps, aren’t I? After all, thanks to you, I have no more chance of happiness, of finding meaning in my life, than he did. And besides, it’s all going to finish in a big smash soon, isn’t it? As you smart machines no doubt know already.’
It didn’t respond to that immediately. ‘You never had a wife. Children.’
‘Sooner no kids at all than to breed at your behest.’
‘You have long lost contact with MinaAndry.’
‘You could say that.’ When the month-long tour of the Shelf Philosophers was concluded, she had gone home with them to continue her interrupted life on Foro. Since then, the accelerated time of the Shelf had whisked her away from him for ever. ‘After – what, three hundred years up there, more? – she’s dust, her descendants won’t remember her, even the language she spoke will be half-forgotten. The dead get deader, you know, as every trace of their existence is expunged. That’s one thing life on Old Earth has taught us. What do you want, anyway?’
‘Your research into the Formidable Caress.’
‘If you can call it research.’
‘Your work is good, from what we have seen of that portion you have shared with other scholars. You cannot help but do good work, Telni. The curiosity I saw burning in that ten-year-old boy, long ago, is still bright.’
‘Don’t try to analyse me, you – thing.’
‘Tell me what you have discovered . . .’
He could not hold back what he had learned, he found. At least the telling distracted him from his craving for drink.
After his discovery of the huge rate at which the inhabitants of Old Earth were plummeting into the future of the universe, Telni had become interested in spans of history. On the Shelf, written records went back some four thousand years of local time. These records had been compiled by a new civilisation rising from the rubble of an older culture, itself wrecked by a disaster known as the Formidable Caress, thought to have occurred some six thousand years before that.
‘But in the external universe,’ Telni said, ‘ten thousand Shelf years corresponds to over three billion years. So much I deduced from my pendulums, swinging away beneath the Platform amid streams of spindling shit and cargo jockey piss . . . Everybody has always thought that the Caresses come about from local events. Something to do with the planet itself. But three billion years is long enough for events to unfold on a wider scale, a universal one. Time enough, according to what Shelf scholars have reconstructed, for stars to be born and to die, for whole galaxies to swim and jostle . . . “Galaxy”, by the way, is a very old term for a system of stars. I found that out for myself. So, you see, I wondered if the Caresses could have some cosmic cause.’
‘You started to correspond with scholars on the Shelf.’
‘Yes. After that first visit by Mina’s party we kept up a regular link, with visits from them – once every couple of years for us, once a generation for them . . . I spoke to the astronomers over there, about what they saw in the sky. And their archaeologists, about what had been seen in the past. There was always snobbishness, you know. Those of us down in the red think we are better because we are closer to the original stock of Old Earth; those up in the blue, who have produced more generations, believe they are superior products of evolution. None of that bothered me. And as their decades ticked by, I think I helped shape whole agendas of research by my sheer persistence.’
‘It must have been rewarding for you.’
‘Academically, yes. I’ve never had any problem, academically. It’s the rest of my life that’s a piece of shit.’
‘Tell us what you discovered.’
‘I don’t have my notes, my books—’
‘Just tell us.’
He sat up and stared into the face of the eerily unchanged boy – who, to his credit, did not flinch. ‘The first Caress destroyed almost everything of what went before, on the Shelf and presumably elsewhere. Almost, but not all. Some trace inscriptions, particularly carvings on stone, have survived. Images, fragmentary, and bits of text. Records of something in the sky.’
‘What something?’
‘The Galaxy is a disc of stars, a spiral. We, on a planet embedded in the disc, see this in cross section, as a band of light in the sky. Much of it obscured by dust.’
‘And?’
‘The ancients’ last records show two bands, at an angle to each other. There is evidence that the second band grew brighter, more prominent. The chronological sequence is difficult to establish – the best of these pieces were robbed and used as hearths or altar stones by the fallen generations that followed . . .’
‘Nevertheless,’ the boy prompted.
‘Nevertheless, there is evidence that something came from out of the sky. Something huge. Another galaxy, so some believe – so I believe. And then there are crude, scrawled images – cartoons, really – of explosions. All over the sky. A million suns, suddenly appearing.’ He imagined survivors, huddled in the ruins of their cities, scratching what they saw into fallen stones. ‘After that – nothing, for generations. People were too busy reinventing agriculture to do much astronomy. That was ten thousand years ago.