“There she is, Ana. The good ship Nostalgia for Infinity. Still very much as you left her.”
“Thanks. Any other cheering sentiments, while you’re at it?”
“The last time I checked the showers were out of order.”
“The last time you checked?”
Volyova paused and made a clucking sound with her tongue. “Buckle up. I’m taking us in.”
They swooped in close to the dark misshapen mass of the lighthugger. Khouri remembered her first approach to this same ship, back when she had been tricked aboard it in the Epsilon Eridani system. It had looked just about normal then, about what one would expect of a large, moderately old trade lighthugger. There had been a distinct absence of odd excrescences and protuberances, a marked lack of daggerlike jutting appendages or elbowed turretlike growths. The hull had been more or less smooth—worn and weathered here and there, interrupted by machines, sensor-pods and entry bays in other places—but there had been nothing about it that would have invited particular comment or disquiet. There had been no acres of lizardskin texturing or dried-mudplain expanses of interlocked platelets; no suggestion that buried biological imperatives had finally erupted to the surface in an orgy of biomechanical transformation.
But now the ship did not look much like a ship at all. What it did resemble, if Khouri had to associate it with anything, was a fairytale palace gone sick, a once-glittering assemblage of towers and oubliettes and spires that had been perverted by the vilest of magics. The basic shape of the starship was still evident: she could pick out the main hull and its two jutting engine nacelles, each larger than a freight-dirigible hangar; but that functional core was almost lost under the baroque growth layers that had lately stormed the ship. Various organising principles had been at work, ensuring that the growths, which had been mediated by the ship’s repair and redesign subsystems, had a mad artistry about them, a foul flamboyance which both awed and revolted. There were spirals like the growth patterns in ammonites. There were whorls and knots like vastly magnified wood grain. There were spars and filaments and netlike meshes, bristling hairlike spines and blocky chancrous masses of interlocked crystals. There were places where some major structure had been echoed and re-echoed in a fractal diminuendo, vanishing down to the limit of vision. The crawling intricacies of the transformations operated on all scales. If one looked for too long, one started seeing faces or parts of faces in the juxtapositions of warped armour. Look longer and one started seeing one’s own horrified reflection. But under all that, Khouri thought, it was still a ship.
“Well,” she said, “I see it hasn’t got a fuck of a lot better since I was away.”
Volyova smiled beneath the brim of her cap. “I’m encouraged. That sounds a lot less like the Inquisitor and a lot more like the old Ana Khouri.”
“Yeah? Pity it took a fucking nightmare like that to bring me back.”
“Oh, this is nothing,” Volyova said cheerfully. “Wait until we’re inside.”
They docked. This part of the ship was not spun for gravity, so they disembarked under weightless conditions, pulling themselves along via grab rails. Khouri was more than willing to let Volyova go ahead of her. Both of them carried torches and emergency oxygen masks, and Khouri was very tempted to start using her supply. The air in the ship was horribly warm and humid, with a rotten taste to it. It was like breathing someone else’s stomach gas.
Khouri covered her mouth with her sleeve, fighting the urge to retch. “Ilia . . .”
“You’ll get used to it. It isn’t harmful.” She extracted something from her pocket. “Cigarette?”
“Have you ever known me to say yes to one of those damned things before?”
“There’s always a first time.”
Khouri waited while Volyova lit the cigarette for her and then drew on it experimentally. It was bad, but still a marked improvement on unfiltered ship air.
“Filthy habit, really,” Volyova said, with a smile. “But then filthy times call for filthy habits. Feeling better now?”
Khouri nodded, but without any great conviction.
They moved through gulletlike tunnels whose walls glistened with damp secretions or beguilingly regular crystal patterns. Khouri brushed herself along with gloved hands. Now and then she recognised some old aspect of the ship—a conduit, bulkhead or inspection box—but typically it would be half-melted into its surroundings or surreally distorted. Hard surfaces had become fuzzily fractal, extending blurred grey boundaries into thin air. Varicoloured slimes and unguents threw back their torchlights in queasy diffraction patterns. Amoebalike blobs drifted through the air, following—or at times swimming against, it seemed—the prevailing shipboard air-currents.
Via grinding locks and wheels they transferred to the part of the ship that was still rotating. Khouri was grateful for the gravity, but with it came an unanticipated unpleasantness. Now there was somewhere for the fluids and secretions to run to. They dripped and dribbled from the walls in miniature cataracts, congealing on the floor before finding their way to a drainage aperture or hole. Certain secretions had formed stalagmites and stalactites, amber and snot-green prongs fingering between floor and ceiling. Khouri did her best not to brush against them, but it was not the easiest of tasks. She noticed that Volyova had no such inhibitions. Within minutes her jacket was smeared and swabbed with several varieties of shipboard effluent.
“Relax,” Volyova said, noticing her discomfort. “It’s perfectly safe. There’s nothing on the ship that can harm either of us. You—um—have had those gunnery implants taken out, haven’t you?”
“You should remember. You did it.”
“Just checking.”
“Ha. You’re actually enjoying this, aren’t you?”
“I’ve learned to take my pleasures where I can find them, Ana. Especially in times of deep existential crisis . . .” Ilya Volyova flicked a cigarette butt into the shadows and lit herself another.
They continued in silence. Eventually they reached one of the elevator shafts that threaded the ship lengthwise, like the main elevator shaft in a skyscraper. With the ship rotating rather than being under thrust it was much easier to move along its lateral axis. But it was still four kilometres from the tip of the ship to its tail, so it made sense to use the shafts wherever possible. To Khouri’s surprise, a car was waiting for them in the shaft. She followed Volyova into it with moderate trepidation, but the car looked normal inside and accelerated smoothly enough.
“The elevators are still working?” Khouri asked.
“They’re a key shipboard system,” Volyova said. “Remember, I’ve got tools for containing the plague. They don’t work perfectly, but I can at least steer the disease clear of anything I don’t want to become too corrupted. And the Captain himself is occasionally willing to assist. The transformations aren’t totally out of his control, it seems.”
Volyova had finally raised the matter of the Captain. Until that moment Khouri had been clinging to the hope that it might all turn out to be a bad dream she had confused with reality. But there it was. The Captain was very much alive.
“What about the engines?”
“Still functionally intact, as far as I can tell. But only the Captain has control of them.”
“Have you been talking with him?”
“I’m not sure talking is quite the word I’d use. Communicating, possibly . . . but even that might be stretching things.”
The elevator veered, switching between shafts. The shaft tubes were mostly transparent, but the elevator spent much of its time whisking between densely packed decks or boring through furlongs of solid hull material. Now and then, through the window, Khouri saw dank chambers zoom by. Mostly they were too large for her to see the other side in the weakly reflected light of the elevator. There were five chambers which were the largest of all, huge enough to hold cathedrals. She thought of the one Volyova had shown her during her first tour of Infinity, the one that held the forty horrors. There were fewer than forty of them now, but that was surely still enough to make a difference. Even, perhaps, against an enemy like the Inhibitors. Provided that the Captain could be persuaded.
“Have you and him patched up your differences?” Khouri asked.
“I think the fact that he didn’t kill us when he had the chance more or less answers that question.”
“And he doesn’t blame you for what you did to him?”
For the first time there was a sign of annoyance from Volyova. “Did to him? Ana, what I ‘did to him’ was an act of extreme mercy. I didn’t punish him at all. I merely . . . stated the facts and then administered the cure.”
“Which by some definitions was worse than the disease.”
Now Volyova shrugged. “He was going to die. I gave him a new lease on life.”
Khouri gasped as another chamber ghosted by, filled with fused metamorphic shapes. “If you call this living.”
“Word of advice.” Volyova leant closer, lowering her voice. “There’s a very good chance he can hear this conversation. Just keep that in mind, will you? There’s a good girl.”
If anyone else had spoken to her like that they would have been nursing at least one interesting dislocation about two seconds later. But Khouri had long since learned to make allowances for Volyova.
“Where is he? Still on the same level as before?”
“Depends what you mean by ‘him.’ I suppose you could say his epicentre is still there, yes. But there’s really very little point in distinguishing between him and the ship nowadays.”
“Then he’s everywhere? All around us?”
“All-seeing. All-knowing.”
“I don’t like this, Ilia.”