Terminal World (60 page)

‘Mm.’ Ricasso carried on for a few paces. ‘That’s tricky stuff to explain.’

‘Could you at least give it a try, before one of us breaks our neck?’

‘It’s about the zones, Doctor - you’re right in that regard. About their very nature. It’s been something of a conundrum to me, you see. I’ve been trying to puzzle out exactly what they are, rather than just accepting them as a feature of a world, like the length of the year or the distance to the horizon. It’s one thing trying to develop medicine to help us better tolerate them, but that doesn’t really get to the essential nub of things, does it?’

‘I wasn’t aware there was a nub. The zones are the zones. They exist. We have to live with them. What more is there to it than that?’

‘On a practical level, very little. Still, wouldn’t it be better to understand them, if there was the slightest chance of that? At least then we’d know what our options were.’

Quillon still wasn’t convinced, but he decided to humour Ricasso anyway. ‘So tell me about this theory.’

‘We’ve already spoken of something going wrong, something that sent the tectomancers out into the world. I think the zones are the visible manifestation of a quite profound wrongness, a wrongness that happens to afflict the very warp and weft of reality.’ Ricasso paused meaningfully. ‘I use the term “warp and weft” advisedly, Doctor. Consider, if you will, a piece of woven fabric, composed of threads going up and down and left to right. That’s your basic cellular grid: a pattern of repeating elements. Squares, in that case, although they don’t have to be. The point is that there’s a uniform pattern, a repeating structure.’

‘As in your game board.’

‘Precisely, Doctor. Now suppose that there are pieces covering some of the squares and leaving others uncovered. The reality that you and I experience - I contend - depends in its absolute totality on the precise arrangement of those pieces. Everything we do - everything that happens to us, from the flow of blood in our bodies to the tiniest flicker of electricity in our heads - relates to a specific, changing pattern on that game board.’

‘We’re made of atoms,’ Quillon said. ‘This much I know.’

‘True enough, Doctor. The game board also encodes a complete description of matter on the atomic scale. In point of fact it goes deeper than that, down to the clockwork inside atoms. But here’s the singular thing.’ Ricasso kicked a rock from under his feet. ‘It isn’t an infinitely fine mesh. Sooner or later you hit the finite resolution of the grid: the limiting size of the squares. You can’t have two pieces in one cell, and a piece mustn’t lie between two cells. Which is of no particular concern to us, since it’s what we’ve evolved with. There’s implicit structure that seems to go down further than the squares, but that’s really just an illusion, like a tiny image in a convex mirror. What we’re dealing with here is truly the base layer of reality.’

‘Intriguing. Please continue.’

‘I think something’s gone wrong with the game board. The cellular grid used to be the same wherever you looked: it was just the game pieces that moved around. Not now, though. Not since the zones broke out.’ Ricasso paused to steady himself as a lozenge-shaped chunk of rubble tilted under his feet. ‘The grid has become discontinuous, for a start. There are tears, rifts, between different parts of it. Those are the zone boundaries. We’d scarcely notice them if the zones were all the same inside, but they’re not. They don’t match up any more, because the grids aren’t the same size on both sides of the boundary.’

Quillon thought back to the game board, and the mismatch he had noticed between its two halves.

‘What could make the grids end up like that?’

‘One can only speculate. It seems probable to me - probable, but not certain - that there’s some hidden parameter, a variable that governs the coarseness of the grid inside each zonal division. Once, it must have been set to the same value everywhere, like a great collection of gyroscope needles all pointing in the same direction. Then the incursion happened - the Mire erupted out into our world, the Eye of God shone through, if you will, and everything went to pot. The gyroscope needles spun around randomly before jamming at certain settings, each of which resulted in a particular zone being fixed at a certain limiting resolution. And that’s what we’re stuck with now: a world made up of different game boards glued together at the edges. The boards can shrink and ooze around each other, but they can’t vanish entirely.’

The rubble was loose under Quillon’s boots. The pod had disturbed a tremendous quantity of dust into the air upon its arrival and now each footfall was adding to the grey choke. He coughed and cleared his throat. ‘It’s a theory. But I still don’t see how it relates to our world.’

‘Consider the passage across a zone boundary. We get mapped from one board to another. If the difference in the cell sizes isn’t severe, our bodies are able to adjust to the change. We’re squishy and adaptable, you see - I don’t need to tell a medical man that. Our atoms fall into slightly different configurations as the grid shifts under them, but on a physiological level, we barely feel it. It’s a small effect, and the neurological symptoms of having your brain very slightly rewired are easily handled by simple drugs.’

‘Antizonals.’

‘You’re ahead of me already, Doctor.’

‘All right. What happens when we cross back over?’

‘You’re remapped to a finer resolution again. Transcription, I call it. You adjust. The key thing, though, is that there must always be a degree of information loss. You can’t travel through a low-state zone - a zone with low cellular resolution - without losing something. It’s just that people - animals, organisms - are rather adept at absorbing the transcription losses. Machines, less so. The change hits them hard at the atomic level because they’re rigid, inflexible. They depend on things fitting together very accurately. Errors propagate all the way up to the macroscopic level. Anything built with very fine tolerances simply can’t survive the passage from a high-state to a low-state zone. It’s like passing a complicated message through a room full of sloppy translators. Stuff drops out. Stuff gets misinterpreted and doesn’t come out the other side the right way. If you’re not careful you end up with gibberish. Machines break, Doctor. And the damage doesn’t get undone when they pass back into a high-state zone.’

‘Again, it’s a nice theory.’

‘But no more than that, you’re thinking. And you know what? You’re absolutely right. It’s not verifiable. It’s not testable. It’s not even something you can mention in polite company.’

Quillon felt the urge to be charitable. ‘Let’s assume you’re right. It’s not as if anyone has any better ideas, is it?’

‘You’re far too kind, Doctor.’

‘How did this happen, though? How did the Eye of God break through? And what does it have to do with Spearpoint? What does it have to do with the tectomancers and their guild?’

‘Pertinent questions, one and all. Questions that, at least at the present juncture, I am singularly ill-equipped to answer.’

 

At length they reached the floor, rubble- and dust-strewn in its own right, but not quite as treacherous as the ramp. The glass dome was perhaps fifty spans across. Remarkably, it showed no evidence of damage, even though huge chunks of rubble must have fallen on it. Quillon scuffed a hand over the glass, which was strangely cold and gelid to the touch, and the patch he exposed was as clear and unscratched as diamond.

‘There’s something inside,’ Ricasso said, holding a hand over his brow to screen out the glare from the sky. ‘Looks like some kind of tableau or shrine.’ He said this on a falling note, as if he had been expecting something more spectacular. ‘Little statues, that’s all.’

Quillon widened the clear patch until he had a better view. Inside the dome was a patch of sandy ground, dotted here and there with rocks and boulders. In the middle of the patch, more or less directly under the apex, was a kind of house raised up on splayed stilts. The house was angular and mechanical, with something of the machine about it, but it didn’t look like any kind of vehicle or aircraft Quillon had ever heard of.

The statues were even more puzzling. There were six of them, arranged in poses around the central feature. They were small enough to be children, none of the figures coming higher than Quillon’s abdomen. But if they were meant to be children - rather than pygmies or little people - then there was no way to tell from their faces. They were clad in white armour, with curved black visors covering their faces. They were humpbacked and they had what looked like accordions fixed to their chests. Their gloved hands appeared out of scale with the rest of them. Some of the ‘children’ had tools with which they were poking or raking the ground, while others were posed as if looking into the far distance, shielding their faceless visages from the sun in eerie mimicry of Ricasso’s posture.

‘What a strange tableau,’ Quillon said.

‘Look, Doctor,’ Ricasso said. ‘On that one’s shoulder.’ He was indicating the nearest figure. ‘Do you recognise it? It’s the same symbol we saw on those crashed machines, on the far side of the walls. The rectangle, with the five stars?’

‘It still doesn’t mean anything to me.’

‘Nor to me, but one must presume it meant something to the people who made this dome.’ He craned his neck upwards. ‘The main one, I mean. The glass one, and these statues, must be even older. If they stumbled on the tableau, the way we’ve done, there’s no telling what significance they might have placed on it.’ Then he paused, made a small laughing sound and said, in an overly emphatic tone,
‘“And in that time, before the gates of paradise were closed to them, men and women were as children.”’

Quillon remembered enough of the quote to complete it for Ricasso.
‘“And so plentiful were the fruits and bounties of paradise that they lived for four-score years, and some lived longer than that. And in that time the Earth was warm and blue and green and many were its provinces.”’
He waited a few moments, conscious of a spell that he did not wish to break, before adding: ‘Do you think it means anything?’

‘Probably not,’ Ricasso said, wiping his dust-smeared hands on his knees. ‘I’m all for looking for meaning in ancient texts. But now and then you have to just accept the fact that you’re dealing with so much religious gibberish.’ Then he looked back up the rubble slope, to the darkening crack of sky. ‘We’d better not keep them waiting, had we? Not when we’ve got a city to save.’

 

Quillon and Ricasso paused on their way out to unload the exposed plates from the balloon cabin’s underbelly camera, then completed their descent via the abandoned buildings fringing the dome. Curtana had set
Painted Lady
down on the nearest patch of open ground, taking the opportunity to carry out certain inspections that would otherwise have been impractical away from Swarm. Quillon and Ricasso were ushered back aboard without comment, Ricasso clutching the plates to his chest protectively.

Then they were airborne, speeding to the east, racing the lengthening shadow of Spearpoint 2. By the next day they had cleared the Bane and the Deadening, and were back over charted territory. Ricasso’s crossing had succeeded, and it had undoubtedly saved them valuable time and fuel. But the mood was not one of jubilation. Swarm had sundered, losing part of itself not to war or accident but to political dissension. And while they had completed the longest part of the journey, they had not necessarily completed the hardest part. They still had to reach Spearpoint, and that meant crossing ground that was now occupied by Skullboys.

With the Bane behind it, Swarm regrouped, pulling in
Painted Lady
and the other scouts. Taxis and cargo ferries fussed between ships. Quillon and Ricasso returned to
Purple Emperor,
the two men wishing to assess the status of the serum stocks aboard the larger ship. Meroka accompanied Quillon, but Agraffe and Curtana had elected to remain aboard
Painted Lady,
to make sure she was readied for the final leg of the journey to Spearpoint. Quillon was reluctant to leave Kalis and Nimcha, but he had been assured that his absence need only be a brief one.

He did not realise he had been tricked - or at least hoodwinked - until the ferry docked and Ricasso announced that his presence was required at Spatha’s tribunal.

Quillon was taken aback. He had assumed that the matter of Spatha’s punishment lay safely in the future, where it need not trouble him.

‘I don’t have to be part of this.’

‘On the contrary, you’re central to it. If Spatha had got his way, we’d both have been hung out to dry. Or did you think the new administration would let bygones be bygones, welcome you into the fold? No, Doctor, I think not. There’d have been another trial - a farce, with only one possible outcome - and you’d have been executed as an example to the waverers.’ Ricasso took firm hold of Quillon’s arm as he steered him into
Purple Emperor.
‘Those plates didn’t just convict Spatha. They saved both of us from the propeller.’

‘Is that still how you do it nowadays?’

‘We’ve made some advances, but there can always be exceptions.’

When they were safely inside, Quillon said, ‘About those plates. We still haven’t really talked about them.’

‘What’s to talk about?’

‘You spied on me. All the time I was down in the laboratory, you were taking photographs.’

Ricasso shrugged off the criticism. ‘It was my life’s work. Do you honestly think I wasn’t going to take some precautions?’

‘I thought I’d earned your trust.’

‘You had. But that doesn’t mean I could be certain that you were
competent.
Suppose I saw you mixing up the reagents by mistake?’

‘From a single photograph?’

‘It was a precaution, that’s all. Let’s not allow it to spoil a perfectly amicable relationship.’

‘I was ready to forget about it, until you dragged me back into Spatha’s trial.’