The Red Queen (37 page)

I tried to think what else to ask but I was so terribly cold now. My lips felt numb and when I lifted my fingers to them, they felt as if they were made of cold marble.

‘Warning, User Seeker. Your thermal signature is fading,’ God said in her own voice, which again came from the vast icy darkness about me. ‘If you remain at this level any longer, you risk hypothermia.’

I did not know what hypothermia was but I could guess it had something to do with the mind-sapping cold. I abandoned the idea of locating the coercer and re-entered the elevating chamber. The androne joined me and the doors closed.

‘Take me back . . . up,’ I managed to say and the elevator began to ascend.

I was stumbling with exhaustion by the time we were making our way along the black bridge road heading for the residence of Kelver Rhonin. Although I was no longer numb with cold, I felt as if my mind had frozen. It was not until we were about to enter the wave building that I remembered Miryum might have to go with us. I would survive her virus, of course, but the others would not. If it turned out that she must accompany us, then she and I would have to travel separately from the others, for presumably I would become contagious too, even if the sickness did not kill me. How was that to be managed? And what of Miryum for whom such a journey would be a death sentence?

I shook my head. What had been the Beforetime expression Katlyn used when she had scolded people for worrying about things that might not come to pass? Don’t borrow trouble? Something like that. Maruman had a more pithy saying.

‘Stop gnawing,’ I muttered, and felt a raw pang of longing for the old cat and his acerbic scolding. I ached to feel his heavy, soft weight on my lap or across my shoulders, the comfort of his mind coiled about mine. Unexpectedly, tears sprang to my eyes, but I blinked them away fiercely, telling myself that I was beyond sensible thought.

I was very glad to enter the residence of Kelver Rhonin with its waving leaf pattern. Bidding the androne stay outside where it could stand up straight, I shut the door behind me and made my way quietly along the hall to the large communal chamber, expecting Tash and Dragon to be sound asleep. But they were both sitting at chairs pulled up to a square table I had not noticed when I had been there before.

‘Did you see them?’ Dragon asked anxiously, starting to her feet. Tash rose too, rubbing her eyes.

‘They are fine but still deeply asleep,’ I said. ‘Which is more than I can say for the pair of you! I told you to get some sleep.’

‘We have prepared beds for all of us, but we could not sleep until you were back safe,’ Dragon protested.

I sighed, but I was touched by her concern. ‘Well, I am glad to see you both, truly. It is a strange, bleak place we have come to. But you had better get some rest now. I will certainly do the same as soon as I have had a proper wash. I will tell the androne to go and see if it can find us some food.’

‘So we will stay here now?’ Tash asked forlornly.

She was shivering slightly, though it was quite warm inside the chamber. Was that God’s doing or was it simply that our entrance had woken some ancient device that had responded to our presence like the doors and walls? Dell had once told me that Ines controlled almost all of the thousands of machines and devices in Oldhaven, including those producing air and light and heat, to take care of the humans in her midst. And Jak said the primary function of any computermachine program was to ensure the safety and the comfort of its human users. It was only if an exception was established, such as with Sentinel, created to reject the control or influence of its creators, that a computermachine would be able to harm humans. But what happened when a computermachine obeyed their program faithfully only to find that they
had
harmed humans, as with God and the sleepers in flawed cryopods. Did they judge that they had failed, and if so, what did failure mean to a machine that could not feel guilt or sorrow or regret?

‘Elspeth?’ Dragon said in exactly the same way Ceirwan had always done, when my mind drifted in the midst of a conversation.

‘I am sorry,’ I said, rubbing my eyes wearily. ‘I am asleep on my feet. Tash, we
will
stay here for the time being. It is warm and safe and we need to organise supplies.’ No sense in mentioning Miryum to them just yet.

‘You would have us leave here?’ Tash asked eagerly. Then she asked less eagerly, ‘To go to another underground place?’

I stared at her, and then realised she still believed the world above to be uninhabitable. ‘We must go from here, so that I can complete my quest. But do not be afraid. The world is not all poison and fire. Beyond the walls of Habitat is a pale and lovely desert, and beyond that are mountains and then the great sea. There are tainted areas, but we can easily avoid them.’

‘We will go outside?’ Tash murmured the words, less as a statement than as an expression of yearning, her face a blaze of hope. Only then did it strike me that she felt utterly oppressed by the subterranean settlement and feared we would have to stay here forever. What a hellish prospect. Habitat would have been preferable, for at least those living in it had sunlight and starlight, sweet air and the smell of growing things. But I had spoken quite sincerely when I said we were safe in Midland, especially given what God had said about beasts carrying terrible Beforetime plagues. I thought of the vicious
rhenlings
from the
graag
and wondered if
they
were the carriers of the Endrax virus. The bites Miryum had suffered sounded small enough to have been delivered by them, except that if one had attacked, a whole flock of them ought to have descended to feast.

‘It is hard to believe it was a lie, all that God said of the world outside Habitat,’ Tash murmured.

I looked at her and said, ‘God did not lie, Tash. God is the voice of a computermachine that simply does what it has been told to do by its makers. If God lied, then the people who made it fed it those lies.’

‘A machine can do something wrong if it is broken,’ Tash said. She looked uncertain, and very fragile.

‘Then what it does cannot really be called wrong.’

Suddenly I became aware that I could
smell
food. I had thought I was conjuring it up out of hunger and yearning. In truth it was so long since I had eaten anything that smelled appetising, that my mouth began to water. ‘Have you found food?’ I asked.

Dragon grinned and bade me come and see for myself what they had created. It turned out to be a rich dark bean stew and a loaf of heavy, moist bread that smelled newly baked. I stared at it in wonder and disbelief, for surely there had not been time enough for bread to rise, let alone for the crock of butter beside it to have been churned, and where had the vegetables I could see in the stew come from?’

‘Tash did it all,’ Dragon announced dramatically. ‘She knew how to make food from the paper packages of dust and stones we found in the storage here. But she says the stuff God sent never tasted like this.’

‘I did not have God’s recipe book,’ Tash said. ‘I followed the instructions on the packets.’

‘I think God did not ever consider taste,’ I said.

‘It certainly did not,’ Dragon said, handing me a plate. I filled it from the pot and then sat gingerly on one of the spindly metal-legged chairs pulled up to a table set against the wall, and began to spoon up greedy mouthfuls of food. For a time I could think of nothing but how good the food was.

‘I do not want to stay here,’ Tash said, suddenly, and all my fears for her rose, but I fought them down and tried to think of some reassuring words to say, that would not be lies.

But before I could utter a word, Dragon laid a restraining hand on her arm and said firmly that we would have to stay for the night, at least, and that she ought to let me eat my meal in peace. ‘You need to sleep, Elspeth. You have very dark rings under your eyes,’ she told me.

‘We prepared the bed chamber in the other hall alongside the bathing room for you,’ Tash said.

‘I am beyond tired and I plan to take your advice and make use of that bed the second I finish eating. Though I ought to bathe. I am truly filthy.’

‘Dirt doesn’t matter,’ Dragon said firmly.

The room turned out to be quite empty of personality and not much different from the one I had slept in at Oldhaven. I stripped off my grimy clothes and, making a mental note to ask God where Hannah had slept, and if any of her things remained, fell into bed and at once into sleep.

I dreamed of Rushton standing upon a raised wooden platform clad only in a loincloth, the sun beating down on his unruly tumble of dark hair. Standing on the platform beside him, a burly man with tightly plaited hair hanging in gleaming oiled loops gesticulated and beamed and talked, though I could not hear what he said. He had a whip in one hand and every now and then he uncoiled it and gave it a loud, efficient crack that made passers-by look around, then drift closer to hear what he was saying. The gathering crowd seemed amused and entertained by his words and I saw that a good many were splendidly if exotically dressed, while others wore little more than rags. The earth under their feet had a reddish tinge, which might mean they were in the Red Land.

The man with the whip made an imperious gesture towards Rushton, who turned obediently, his face utterly expressionless. Then I heard a cry and several shouts and life returned to his face as he looked around, his dark green eyes suddenly very alert. The watchers and the whip holder turned in the same direction, their expressions puzzled, amusement giving way to confusion and then, as cries became screams, to shock and terror. As the crowd turned to run in the opposite direction, the whip man stood for one indecisive moment before leaping from the platform and running after them. Rushton leapt from the platform, too, but jerked to a stop and fell hard to the ground, and I realised he was chained to the platform. He sat up, shaking his head, and turned to kick the wooden pole to which he had been shackled, but he was barefoot and it would not give way.

He was facing the source of the commotion, and all at once his eyes went beyond the platform and he grew very still. His expression shifted from determined urgency to wariness and caution. He turned onto his belly and crawled under the platform and lay utterly still.

The screams continued and then I heard a terrible bestial howling.

I woke suddenly into darkness and lay, wide eyed, my heart pounding at the memory of the dream. It had been too brief for me to tell if it was a nightmare or a true dream, but it had been so strange that I felt it must be the former. Seeing Rushton had shaken me to the marrow, for I had managed to push him to the bottom of my mind, but now I saw him clearly in my mind’s eye and I felt a desperate, impossible longing for him that I knew would never be answered.

It was some time before I could think about where I was, and of the dramatic events of the previous day. Then I remembered the others, lying in the sleep laboratory in the Galon Institute, and wondered if they might not have begun to wake. The thought made me sit bolt upright.

I discovered my head was aching, probably from thirst, or maybe the lack of fresh air, though the air in the chamber was neither thin nor bad. Probably God was ensuring we had air just as it had ensured there was water. I remembered then that God had said I would be told when the others stirred, and so I got up and padded to the bathing room, for the thought of water reminded me that I had been too weary to bathe the night before.

I was wearing my rough Speci underclothes, and my arms, hands and face were filthy. I undressed, entered the upright bathing cupboard, and turned the water lever, closing my eyes to the rain of warm water with pleasure, thinking there were some things the Beforetimers had definitely got right. I stood for a long while under the water, thinking over the events of the previous day, of Dameon and the others, and then of Miryum in the deep icy storage where anomalies were kept, and the fact that she carried some terrible plague seed which would become active and eventually kill her after she was awakened. I resolved to reach her mind and free her from her dream, and speak to her before I decided what to do. Until I did that, there was no point in agonising over her fate.

Forcing myself to get out of the waterfall, I discovered the walls were streaming with moisture and the room thick with steam. I found some enormous towels and dried myself. Not wanting to put on my soiled Speci clothes, I simply wrapped the towel around my body when I was dry, and made my way to the main chamber, thinking of the stew Tash had prepared, for we had not eaten all of it the night before. Then it struck me that I did not truly know whether it was day or night, for it must have been midmorning or even midday by the time I had finally got into bed. But perhaps it did not matter in a city where eternal night reigned.

I had asked God to make it light, but perhaps it had proven impossible, for surely God did not control the whole of Midland, even if it had been able to speak to me in the deep storage where Miryum lay beneath the floor.

The walls of the passage glowed to sun-dappled life as I passed along it and into the kitchen, and on impulse, I asked God what other patterns there were, requiring it to answer me very quietly so as not to awaken the others. It offered a number of possibilities and, intrigued, I asked for a desert sunrise, since I felt as if it were early morning.

In the blink of an eye, the pattern of moving leaves was replaced by an undulant horizon that ran around the whole chamber. Below the horizon was the suggestion of dunes, purple and deep green with pools of shadow, and soft peaks touched with the rose light flowing from the sky just above the horizon, which faded into the blue-black darkness of night higher up the wall and on the roof of the chamber.

‘God, how are my technicians?’ I asked, moving to the kitchen space to see what I could find to eat.

‘The core temperature of the three technicians is rising and the temperature in the chamber is rising to complement it,’ God said. ‘Soon their heartbeat and breathing will reassert themselves. They will wake in approximately twenty-nine hours.

I found the stew in a pot in a white cupboard that breathed out a wave of frigid air. It was cold of course, but I carried the pot to the bench, got myself a cup of water and went to sit on the chair by the table. ‘God, tell me as simply as you can about the govamen,’ I said, as I began to eat. The stew was nicer hot but still very good cold.

‘Government is a pre-Cataclysm term for a group of people who have been given the power to make and enforce laws for a country or region. They can be chosen as representatives by the majority of the people of that country or region, or they can be part of a group that imposes its will on the many by main force,’ it answered, modulating its voice so as to speak quietly.

‘And the Galon Institute was built by some of these govamen?’ I asked.

‘The Galon Institute is not a government institution. It is part of the Pellmar Quadrants, and is privately owned. But the project to create my program and other post-Cataclysm research was funded by the Uropan government.’

‘Who did Kelver Rhonin work for?’

‘Prime User Kelver Rhonin was an employee of the Uropan government seconded to the facility to work on the development of a computer program capable of operating the search and rescue program being developed here. That is, on the God Project,’ God said.

So he had been employed by the Uropan branch of govamen. ‘What about the others?’ I asked.

‘What others are you referring to, User Seeker?’ God asked.

‘All of the other people who lived in Midland? Did they serve the govamen as well?’

‘The only other people who inhabited the Pellmar Quadrants were technicians and workers employed by the Pellmar Corporation, which was a cooperative made up of representatives of conservation groups and various private interests.’

‘What is a cooperative?’ I asked. ‘Tell me as simply as you can,’ I added hastily.

‘A cooperative is a pre-Cataclysm term for a group of people who form an entity to provide themselves with work or with goods or services, and within which all members have equal power,’ God answered.

I frowned, wondering what an entity was. Trying to understand what the computermachine was telling me was very difficult. There were so many unfamiliar words and complicated sentences that, even when I understood, I was not sure that I was understanding what had been meant. I got to my feet and carried the pot containing the remainder of the stew back to the cold cupboard, not wanting to eat it all in case one of the others woke hungry. I went to gaze out of the window into the darkness, and another question came to me.

‘God, do you know why contact between the Pellmar Quadrants and the govamen terminal was severed?’

‘There is too little data to draw any firm conclusion,’ God answered.

‘Speculate for me,’ I invited, as I had sometimes done in guildmerges when I was looking for ideas and inspiration.

‘Contact with all government terminals and portals ended simultaneously and without notice, which suggests the action originated at a single source,’ God said.

I was not sure what it was saying. ‘What do you mean by a single source? Did Kelver Rhonin have any theories about what the source was?’

‘Prime User Kelver Rhonin believed that links to government terminals were severed by the prototype Sentinel program as part of its responsive protocol.’

My heart leapt in my chest. ‘God, tell me what you know of Sentinel.’

‘The Sentinel Project, originally known as the Guardian Project, was a sophisticated and comprehensive state-of-the-art computer system developed by an alliance of the five principal world powers, intended as a nuclear deterrent and as a means of preventing aggression by terrorists whose origins and purposes were difficult or impossible to track, because retaliation would occur regardless of the political affiliations of the perpetrators. Once installed in its dedicated high-security facility, the completed Sentinel was to have complete access to all private and public computer networks in all five government territories, in order to be able to effectively and comprehensively monitor the movement of weapons, weapon components and relevant intelligence throughout the world, as well as aggressive activities of all kinds. Its mandate was primarily to issue impartial worldwide warnings prior to incidents in order that they might be prevented and would-be perpetrators apprehended and interrogated. The Balance of Terror program is a complex series of triggering devices connected to a vast arsenal of weapons, connected solely to Sentinel. No human would have access to it and to ensure that, Sentinel was given its own formidable defences. It was believed that, isolated thus from human influence or power, but having access to all electronic communications, Sentinel would be better able to issue warnings that would be trusted and judge the source of any incident that did take place impartially, and finally, if necessary, to execute a balanced retaliation. The environmental and collateral human cost of such a targeted retaliation would be minimal in comparison to traditional human engagements, and would not lead to escalation since no power would be held to be responsible.’

I nodded, pressing my hands against the glass, no longer seeing the darkness beyond.

‘God, did Kelver Rhonin play any part in the creation of Sentinel?’ I asked. I was not sure why I asked. Perhaps it was only because Hannah had been in Pellmar Quadrants in the Beforetime, and had discovered the means of gaining access to God then, and maybe even from Kelver Rhonin.

God said, ‘User Kelver Rhonin was employed by the Uropan government as a consultant hired for the work he did here. He did not have access to the Sentinel Project, which was a united governments initiative, at that time in the final stages of development, and located in Inva at the Hegate Complex. However, he was interested in the project and followed its progress closely. He knew that in its final form, Sentinel would have the capacity to sever all electronic communications in any area of the world where its intelligence led it to expect the occurrence of an aggressive incident, for the purposes of immobilising perpetrators prior to hostile activities. After the computerlink to the government was terminated following a major incident on this continent, Prime User Kelver Rhonin speculated that this had occurred during the final stage of the testing phase of the link between the Sentinel prototype and the Balance of Terror computer array, enabling Sentinel to make use of its power to sever communication links in the region responsible for an act of terrorism or war and in the region where the act occurred. Later environmental data confirmed that a true Class B Cataclysm had occurred, involving many locations and responsive attacks, following an initial triggering act of aggression. He later speculated that the original triggering aggression might have been centred on the prototype Sentinel itself, causing it to activate the elements of the Balance of Terror arsenal to which it had been linked.’

I went to sit down, thinking how strange it was to be having a conversation with a machine. I had been following its complex explanation as best I could, but there were many words I did not understand, or whose meaning I had to guess at. Yet the gist of it seemed to be that Kelver Rhonin thought that the Great White had come about because someone had attacked the Sentinel that had been developed at Inva, causing it to make use of the Balance of Terror weapons. That would certainly fit with my true dreams of Cassy, but who would have been mad enough to attack a computermachine with access to such formidable and terrifying weaponry? And why would this cause BOT to unleash so much worldwide damage? Could it have overreacted if it was Sentinel that had been attacked? Or was it that the attack had damaged Sentinel, causing it to send wrongful signals to the BOT computermachine, resulting in a vast and terrible response?