Dloan shook his head understandingly.
“So,” Miz said, “what have we got to look forward to apart from finding the Solipsists there first?”
“There are no more major obstacles after the beach I mentioned, though there is a small hill to be climbed, avoiding a cliff which is sheer to the water. The end of the fjord has many small islands and rocks, starting from about ten kilometres or so from its head; I believe these are why the flying boat did not simply land immediately. The end of the fjord is quite sudden; there is no significant narrowing, just the islands and then an almost straight length of shore in front of a marshy plain, which looks as though it is the result of land reclamation.
“The Gun is, I believe, in a stone tower. The tower is approximately fifteen metres high and seven metres in diameter and topped with a hemispherical black dome of indeterminate substance. It stands in the centre of a stone square about fifty metres to a side; the square has a circular wall half a metre high built upon it which just touches the mid-point of each edge of the square, and a metre-high stone post at each corner. A small river delta forms the far boundary of the square; on this side there is a field of tall rushes.
“The stone tower is surrounded by numerous human bodies, pieces of equipment and debris; these are mostly within the circular stone wall. From the state of decay involved, I would estimate that some of the bodies and pieces of debris have been there for many decades. The most recent bodies in the vicinity appear to be those of two young men I took to be Solipsists by their uniforms. Both bodies were attached to parachutes; one lay against the inside of the circular wall, his parachute snagged on a small tree just outside the square; the other parachutist appeared to have been dragged for some distance through the rushes before being stopped by rocks, and I was able to determine that he had been killed by some form of laser device which had removed his head. It had also left a hole in his chest and another in his groin, consistent with a sixty-millimetre beam. I deduced that the dome on top of the tower housed such a device, perhaps along with the concomitant detection and tracking equipment it would require.”
“Amazing deduction,” muttered Miz. He glanced at Sharrow but she didn’t seem to have heard.
“I noticed,” Feril continued, “that the few birds which overflew the area kept well away from the tower, though there were avian bodies of various species distributed around it, along with those of numerous small animals. Insects appeared to be tolerated. I conducted a brief experiment with pieces of wood, and found that anything moving within twenty-five metres of the centre of the tower with a frontal area greater than approximately two square centimetres will be attacked by the tower’s defences. I believe this to be a powerful X-ray laser, though the beam used on the pieces of wood I threw into this zone was considerably smaller than those which had killed the two Solipsist parachutists. I also noticed that when the dead parachutist resting against the inside of the wall moved-when his parachute was caught by a gust of wind-the beam that hit him was narrow and attenuated, and one of several dozen or so which had seemingly hit him after his death while he was presumably in the same state of morbid mobility.”
“Well,” Sharrow said. “Sounds good news and bad.” She looked distracted, grimacing as she rubbed at her left glove. “Let’s assume whatever’s in the tower is… intact, but-”
“But how the hell do we get in when nobody else has?” Miz said, kicking at a rotten branch in his way.
“Ah,” the android said. It held up one finger. “I mentioned the stone posts at each corner of the square.”
“Yes?” Zefla said.
“Beneath a cover on the top of each post,” Feril said, “there is a hand-lock plate; a security device in the shape of a doublethumbed hand. From their construction I would say that they are designed to react to some chemical or genetic trigger rather than the more usual handprint-pattern. At least two of these posts appear to be operational, the other two having been partially dismantled. All four bear the legend, ‘Female Line’.”
Sharrow stopped; they all did.
Zefla looked at her. “Sounds like Gorko again,” she said. “Might just switch the thing off for you, eh, kid?”
Sharrow was staring at her feet. Then she looked up at Zefla and seemed to shake, and then smiled and nodded. “Yes,” she said. She gazed at her left hand, holding it awkwardly. “Yes, it might.”
“So even if the Solipsists do get there first,” Miz said, “they won’t be able to do anything.”
“Yeah,” Zefla said. “But if they do get there before we do, they can make it impossible for us to do anything either.”
Sharrow swayed, blinking, trying to think. There was something else, too. So hard to think.
Zefla looked at Feril. “When will you have to set off if you’re to rendezvous with the sub?”
(Yes, that’s it, Sharrow thought.)
“In about thirty hours,” Feril said.
Zefla nodded, looking at Sharrow. “Onward?” she asked.
Sharrow swallowed. “Onward,” she said.
Her hand hurt. She felt hungry and nauseous at the same time. She recalled Miz talking about eating fish and suddenly her mouth filled with saliva as she remembered the taste of spiced, blackened fish. That had been in Shouxame, in Tile, many years ago. She had sat at the rough wooden tables with the others, beneath the lanterns and the firecracker strings and the glow-ropes. They had eaten fish caught in the lake that afternoon and drunk a lot of wine; then she and Miz had gone to bed, and then while they were making love the firecrackers had gone off, and she was there again, in the hotel in Malishu, on the bed under the membrane roof in front of the tall mirrors, but even as she thought about that something dragged her further onwards, transported her forward and back at the same time, to that quiet hotel in the mountains, with the view over the hills and the windows opened to the cool breeze which blew the gauzy white curtains softly in and made her skin tingle and dried her sweat and gave Miz cold bumps, and her hands stroked him, fingers stroked him, smoothing the skin on his back and his flanks and shoulders and behind and chest, urging him, controlling him, moving him, and he was a beautiful grey shape above her in the first hint of dawn, and a slowly pulsing presence inside her, a soft-hard rocking nudging her closer and closer to an edge like the edge of the balcony, grey-pink stone through the haze of curtains, shoving and nuzzling and pressing her closer and closer, his breath and her breath like the noise of surf, so that she remembered building sand-castles on the shore once when she was young.
Breyguhn and she; they had each built a castle and made it as high and as strong as they could, right alongside each other; they had each put a paper flag on top of the tallest tower of their castles, and waited to see whose castle would collapse first; the two-moon tide had come in strong and fast and the waves beat at the walls they had each built, and she had seen her own castle start to crumble at the edges, but knew she had built better and had really been watching Breyguhn’s, willing the waves to hit the base of that sea-facing wall, and watched wave after wave after wave hit the sand, bringing the wall to the point of crumbling but not quite undermining it sufficiently, and slowly an incredible sensation of expectation and frustration had built up in her chest and belly, along with a fury that the sea could so nearly hand her victory but then hold back-as the power and strength of the waves seemed to ebb briefly, and no more damage was done-and started to believe that it was never going to happen, that neither castle was ever going to fall, but then seen the waves come strongly in again, breaking and surging and sucking at the castles’ walls, and then finally, finally, finally, with a sudden last pulsed rush of waves-waves that went on and on, piling into the sand when the thing was done and the contest decided-the whole wall of Breyguhn’s castle collapsed and fell, tipping out and breaking in the air and disintegrating into the waves, turning them golden brown as the surf fell tumbling over the wreckage and burst against the rough vulnerability of the sand revealed inside, and smoothed that and slipped back and surged forward again and smoothed and slipped and smoothed and slipped and smoothed, tumbling Breyguhn’s tower and flag into the water.