by nature with anything resembling a wheel, so he concluded that the world of masts was populated almost exclusively by machines.
Lumen had told him that, he recalled, belatedly. Lumen had also told him that the stars were more densely aggregated in the center of the sidereal system—but the ethereal had not warned him that the sky would be on fire. When he looked up, Thomas could not tell whether it was night or day on the world to which they had come, and took leave to wonder whether such terms might even be meaningful here. The sky was awash with colored light; full of stars as it was, they seemed to him more like stars reflected in a turbid sea than stars viewed directly through the lens of the Earth’s atmosphere. He had looked at the Milky Way through the lens of a refracting telescope as good as any the finest lens-grinders in Europe could contrive, but all he had seen was a greater profusion of tiny, pale and seemingly-feeble stars. These stars seemed different, and the etheric ocean in which they swam seemed very different too.
“It’s the various effects of matter being smeared and transmuted as it falls into the Pit,” Lumen said. “Stars being pulled apart and transformed. You might be able to imagine it best as a kind of alchemy.”
“Paracelsus might,” Thomas murmured, almost audibly, “or even Master Dee—but not me.” He had to turn away then to help John Field, whose legs had given way under him, due to the psychological effects of the one-dimensional journey. Drake was similarly busy with de Vere, although Aristocles and his fellow moths were already trying to hurry everyone off the platform on which they all stood, herding them towards a double door set in a wall. Raleigh had the right to be the most distressed of them all, but the young man had made every effort to collect himself, and it was he who led the way at the urging of their captors.
The humans huddled together as they moved, almost as if they had begun to imitate the representatives of True Civilization—but the real reason was that no one dared step any closer to the platform edge than was absolutely necessary. Had anyone stumbled over it, they would have had a very long fall, and their parachutes were safely stowed away on the Queen Jane.
The stem supporting the platform was hollow, and it was there that a door opened, to reveal a circular chamber some nine or ten feet in diameter. There was room enough for all the humans inside, and for one insectile companion. Aristocles took the extra space, unseconded now by any of his own or any kindred kind.
As the cylinder began to descend towards the distant surface, it occurred to Thomas that it would probably be easy enough for the five humans to overpower their guardian and strike out on their own into the strange world of laboring machines—but no one made the slightest hostile gesture.
“Can you ask Aristocles what is at stake here, Lumen?” Thomas asked his passenger silently. “Are we really about to be put on trial, representing our species in a court of monsters?”
“Don’t be afraid,” Lumen countered. “When the time comes, if you will let me speak on your behalf, I promise that I shall do my best to protect you, and see you safely back to your own world.”
Thomas tried to suppress his doubts regarding his invader, or at least to make them less transparent, but he was out of his depth. He was fairly certain that he had more enemies than he knew, and he could not be sure that he had any friends at all, save for his crew—and even then, the only ones of whom he was completely sure were Drake and Raleigh. Even if Lumen were perfectly sincere, the ethereal had no more authority here than Thomas had, and no matter what his “best” might consist of, it might be utterly impotent to protect them from harm or win them a passage home. If Lumen were not sincere, and was not the friend to humankind as which it posed....
“That way lies madness, Thomas,” said the passenger in his mind. “You can trust me, and you should...if only because the alternative is too dreadful to contemplate.”
“Why are you interested in this matter?” Thomas wanted to know. “And why were you ready and waiting when Master Dee’s etherlock failed?”
“I have devoted seven hundred years to the close study of your species,” the ethereal told him, startling him yet again with the casual revelation of its antiquity. “I followed the course of Dr. Dee’s experiments with great interest—you were, after all, outward bound for my world—the moon was only a contingent objective.”
It seemed a frank enough answer—and yet, it seemed to Thomas that it was subtly evasive, and that the evasion in question might be as ominous as any, in its implication that the millions of millions of millions of other citizens of the unimaginably broad universe might be no more inclined to anything humans would recognize as justice than they were to anything humans would recognize as generosity.
The descending chamber came to a stop with a sudden jerk, making all six of its passengers stagger sideways.
“We have arrived, it seems,” Drake murmured, covering his unsteadiness with irony.
De Vere had just enough time to say: “No, I don’t think...,” when the sliding doors that had sealed the chamber burst inwards, brutally ripped from their hinges.
Mechanical arms reached in to seize Aristocles, while mechanical blades sliced his head from his thorax, and slit his abdomen from top to bottom. The ichor that flooded the floor of the chamber was a delicate shade of turquoise.
Then came the swarm of Earthly insects. They were, at least, things that were the same size of Earthly insects, which flew in buzzing fashion, exactly as a swarm of Earthly bees might do...and which stung frail flesh as a swarm of worker bees might do, in furious defense of their hive. Their stings, it rapidly transpired, were narcotic.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“I apologize for stunning you, Master Digges,” said a honeyed voice, in English, before Thomas had even become fully aware of the fact that he was not dead. “Time was—and is—of the essence. It will only be a matter of minutes before they find us, and a few minutes longer before they treat me as unkindly as I treated their unappreciated scholar.”
Thomas opened his eyes abruptly, but there was little enough light to dazzle them. He was in a grey and gloomy space, lying slantwise on a ramp. Although the entity that was standing over him was, indeed, standing as a living biped might, there was light enough to display a certain metallic luster on its surface and a certain mechanical rigidity to its stance...and yet, the surface did not seem as shiny or rigid as it might have done, and the contours of the body were more reminiscent of upholstered leather than wrought iron. Its shape was only vaguely humanoid; it had six limbs and its mutely gleaming eyes were compound.
“What are you?” Thomas asked.
“A machine, as you must have deduced,” the other said. “But I’m a hardcore, like you, not a dweller in inner space. Our kind is a tiny minority in this universe, Master Digges, but I wanted you to know that your species is not alone, no matter what the Exos may have told you. My kind is artificial, to be sure—but we were grateful to discover that it is not, after all, unnatural. That is why I took the trouble to pay far more attention to Aristocles’ reports than his own superiors, and to make sure that there were some of us among those delegated to learn the languages he and his fellows had recorded and decoded but could not reproduce—with the intention, ultimately, of mounting our own expedition to Earth. When they send you home, be sure to tell your fellows that we shall come when we can. Centuries might pass—many generations, in the reckoning of your ephemeral kind—but we will come. We are of similar kinds, you and I.”
“I am not sure whether to believe that we shall be allowed to go home,” Thomas said, warily. “Whatever Aristocles might have promised, you seem to have deprived of us whatever protection he could provide.”
