He thought back to something Valseir had said once: Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.
Valseir had been talking about the Truth and other religions, but Fassin felt he was in a similar situation here. He had no real choice but to act as though all this was genuine. Even so, he had to keep the idea that it wasn’t at the back of his head, just in case. Because if all this was real then he was, maybe, on the brink of the most astounding discovery in all human history, a revelation that could do untold harm or bring inestimable benefits to any combination of the Mercatoria, its adversaries and just about every other space-faring species in the galaxy. He remembered confronting the emissarial projection, what seemed like an age ago, back in the Autumn House. Which was more likely: what appeared to be the case, or this all being a lie, a setup, a vast and incomprehensible joke? Discuss.
He ran every check he could while he was outside the hull of the Velpin. He was in space. Everything checked out. Or he was in a sim so complete that there was no disgrace in being taken in by it. Back to the Truth again. Hatherence would have appreciated the dilemma.
He could, if he really wanted, he supposed, just try and run away. The gascraft would support him indefinitely, it was capable of independent entry into a planetary atmosphere, and if he used almost all his reaction mass he could be in the inner system of this star Aopoleyin in a few years. He could even sleep most of the way and hardly notice the journey. But then what? He’d never heard of the place. It was somewhere in the Khredeil Tops (whatever those were) according to the gascraft’s rudimentary star atlas, but it wasn’t listed as a human or Mercatorial inhabited system and there was no mention of it having any inhabitants at all. That didn’t mean there was nobody there — everywhere seemed to support somebody who called it home — but it meant that he’d probably be no further forward trying to get back home.
He came back to the ship when Quercer Janath signalled excitedly that they’d found something. It wasn’t Leisicrofe’s ship; it was the delicate ball of gas and chemicals — a lacework ball of cold and dirty string open to the vacuum, held together by just a trace of gravity — that was the Clouder’s mind.
… Looking for… ?
— A Dweller. A gas-giant Dweller, called Leisicrofe.
… Image…
· Image?
… Told image expect… specific image…
— Ah. I have an image with me. How… ? Where, I mean what do I show it to, so you can see it?
… No… describe…
— Okay. It’s an image of white clouds in a blue sky.
… Accords…
— So you can tell me? Where Leisicrofe is?
… Went…
· When did he go?
… Measure time how you… ?
— Standard system?
… Known… being Leisicrofe went 7.35 x 10° seconds ago…
Fassin did the calculation. About twenty years earlier.
He was nestled into the outer regions of the Clouder’s mind, the little gascraft resting gently between two broad strands of gas a fraction less cold than the surrounding chill of deep space. He was, in effect, delving, stopped right down to talk to something that made a deep, slow-timing Dweller look like a speed-freak. Clouders thought surpassingly slowly.
A signal from outside, from the Velpin. To the Clouder he sent,
— Where did Leisicrofe go?
Then he clicked up to normal speed.
“Are you going to be much longer?” Y’sul asked, sounding irritable. “I am rapidly running out of patience with this bilateral monomaniac. It’s been ten days, Fassin. What’s happened? Fallen asleep?”
“I’m going as fast as I can. Only been a few tens of seconds for me.”
“You could just stay and think at normal speed, you know. Give us all time to mull over whatever this gas-brain’s saying. No need to go doing this show-off delving stuff.”
“Less of a conversation that way. This shows respect. You get more out of people if you—”
“Yes yes yes. Well, you just carry on. I’ll try and find more games to keep this split-personality cretin occupied. You rote off and commune with this space-vegetable. I’ll do the real hard work. Sorry I came along now. If I’ve missed any more good battles while I’ve been away…’ His voice faded into the distance.
Fassin descended into extreme slow-time again. The Clouder still hadn’t replied.
At least this time there was no insane spiralling. There was the same fuzzy, low-reliability screen to distract them as they wafted away from the Clouder and made for the hidden wormhole mouth, and the doors out of the passenger compartment were just as locked, but there was no fierce spinning. Fassin let Quercer Janath take over the gascraft remotely and turn off its systems. He didn’t bother to clear any of the shock-gel or turn the faceplate clear this time, he just put himself into a trance. It was easy, a lot like preparing to go down into slow-time. And it meant he couldn’t see or hear Y’sul complaining about the ignominy of being zapped unconscious just because they were going on a space journey.
They were making for somewhere called Mavirouelo — yet another place Fassin had never heard of. This was where Hoestruem had said that Leisicrofe was going next. The Clouder hadn’t known if this was a system, a planet, another Clouder or what. Quercer Janath had gone silent for a moment when they heard the name, and Fassin had sensed them consulting the ship’s crude galactic atlas. They declared that they knew the place. A planet, in the Ashum system. (Fassin, or at least the gascraft’s memory, did know of this place. It was even connected, with its own Mercatorial-controlled wormhole, though Fassin suspected they wouldn’t be using it.) Total travel time to be expected was “a few days’.
As he slid into unconsciousness, Fassin’s thoughts were of how beautiful the Clouder had looked. The vast being was like a million great long gauzy scarves of light, a whisper of matter and gravity close to nothingness that massed more than many solar systems, drifting yet purposeful, intent by ancient decision, along a course charted out over millions of years, propelled, dirigible by minute flexings of cold plasmas, by the force of near-not-there-at-all magnetic fields, by sigh-strength expulsions and drawings-in of interstellar material. Cold and dead-seeming yet alive and thinking. And beautiful, in the right light. Seen in a fitting wash of wavelengths, there was something endlessly, perfectly sublime about…
* * *
Saluus stood on a balcony of ice and metal, looking out at the view, his breath misting in the air before him.
The Shrievalty retreat was embedded in and partially sculpted from the frozen waterfall Hoisennir, a four-hundred-metre-high, klick-wide cliff of ice marking where the river Doaroe began its long fall from the high semi-arctic plateau towards the tundra and plains beyond. A low winter sun provided a grand display of Sepektian clouds and a fuzzy purple-red sunset, but nowhere near enough heat to start melting the ice.
Sepekte wobbled slowly and not especially significantly. Its arctic and antarctic circles, where the sun alternately never set or never rose during the heights of summer and depths of winter, were less than a thousand kilometres in diameter. Officially classed as a hot\temperate planet by human standards, its winters were longer but less severe than those of Earth and their worst effects were confined to smaller areas than on humanity’s original home. But the Hoisennir waterfall was far north and high up in the arctic-shield mountains, and the Doaroe spent standard years at a time entirely frozen.