Aboard the KFS Sidereal, things are hotting up. Tild, the ship’s royal passenger, upon whose safe conveyance to her fiancé hopes for the future well-being and security of Kern, Argeral and pretty much the entire B-Roth star system largely rest – as, too, does the honour of Commander Tszvetan, her conveyor – is voyaging (as protocol demands) in an isolation that is splendid but no less solitary for that. For the first moon cycle or so of the long trip, she flops around the immaculately contoured repos, ottomans and hanging eggs that deck her suite. Now and again she ventures out to traipse the Sidereal’s long, empty corridors; if a crew member tries obsequiously to return her to her quarters, she rebukes him for presuming to tell her where she may wander, tossing back as she spits the words at him black hair that’s streaked with radium-coloured zigzags. Despite her haughtiness, the crew are all in awe of her – star-struck by not her status, but her spunk. Early on, soon after they’d left Doon Leer, she would turn up in the engine rooms, play Atcheque with the stokers and swap some of her philtres for the amphoras of ’kwavit they’re carrying back to Kern (‘back’ as in back again: the liquor, native to their planet, only acquires its character when it’s transported twice across the Kwador boundary line, one time in each direction, the resulting chemical mutation generating its distinctive taste and potency). When informed by blu-text that such fraternising was forbidden to the crew, she merely shrugged; but on learning that the stoker who’d been friendliest to her had received a beating for his kindness, she halted the visits. So now she just flops and lounges, lonely, homesick and, above all, bored.
It’s not until the middle of the second cycle that she finds her way to the Observatory. This chamber sits above the Sidereal’s uppermost starboard trusses – hovers almost, an appendage, communicating with the main body of the vessel only through a spiral staircase coiled around the fixing arm that alone prevents it from detaching itself and drifting into space. The chamber is perfectly spherical: a cyst, or fishbowl, or giant helmet, floating eyeball, whose wall (feat of engineering) is formed of a single tempered sapphire-glass sheet. Inside, torquetums, dioptras, astrolabes and spectrohelioscopes nestle in soft velveteen moulds around a central standing console to whose upper surface is affixed a second and much smaller vitreous globe, a ‘reader’ capable of both ascertaining star positions and ascribing to newly encountered constellations, when its memory’s up to the task, tentative designations, whose names it, when required, projects across the larger dome’s interior, thereby aligning territory and map. On stumbling across this room, Tild, not one for reticence, starts making free with instruments and console, holding to her eyes and twiddling the discs and flanges of the former, slowly moving downturned hands above the latter, as though warming them (the reader’s operated like a theremin). It’s while standing thus cocooned by astral coordinates both actual and projected, light sliding across her face and adding new transversals to her hair’s angular geometry, that her immersive reverie is rudely broken into by a male voice issuing, it seems, from space itself:
‘You’re not supposed to be here.’
Tild spins round. He’s standing behind her, near the hatchway to the staircase – although not that near: he must have been observing her unnoticed for some time. Counterweighing shock at his presence, fury at his voyeurism and a need to reassert authority, the Princess, raising back to her right eye the astrolabe her hands almost let drop when he first spoke, enquires disinterestedly:
‘Says who?’
The question is rhetorical: the voice was Tszvetan’s. He, too, has spent much of the last moon cycle flopping about the Sidereal’s navigation deck and wandering its corridors, the most recently trekked of which has brought him to this eyrie. Is it anxiety about fulfilling his obligation to his ‘uncle’ (in fact, uncle) Louis Q, or lingering grief at his parents’ loss, or simply solitude induced by years of long celestial voyaging, that lends him such a sad and contemplative air? Or is it something more immediate? Taking a step forwards, he tells Tild:
‘You’re holding it wrong. Here, let me show you …’
Thus begins the first Observatory Summit. He explains to her the reader’s software, talks her through rotation of styluses, alignment of tabulae quinoctialis, interconversion between horizontals and ecliptics … To his surprise, she demonstrates a complete understanding of the mathematics involved, even correcting him when he mis-states the off-set of the axis of rotation of the planet closest to which they happen to be passing just now, Gallon, as 25 degrees (it’s 23.5).
‘Your computation’s weak,’ she scolds him teasingly.
‘It served me fine during the Saraõnic War,’ he quips back.
The atmosphere inside the chamber changes instantly, as though the thermo-gauge had yanked the temperature down several notches.
‘The Third one?’ Tild asks.
‘I was too young to fight in the other two,’ he answers.
‘My uncle died in that war,’ she tells him.
He pauses for a while, then says, without any affect or inflection:
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Are you?’ She sets the sextant she’s got in her hand down roughly, hairline fracturing its index mirror. Looking for some other object to take up, her hand’s drawn towards the rapier he removed (the better to facilitate his taking up position right against the reader’s console stand) from his waist and laid down moments ago, which is now humming softly on the deck.
‘Don’t touch my rapier,’ he says measuredly and quietly – and the Princess, despite being unused to obeying orders, even less interdictions, freezes inches from the weapon. Sensing his control of the situation, Tszvetan presses his advantage home by adding, in a voice tinged with cruelty: ‘It’s killed people.’
These lines bring the Summit to an abrupt close. Tild storms from the Observatory, and spends the next three or four diurnals beaming large 3-D projections into her suite’s stale air. She beams two Atcheque pieces she finds in her pocket, prisoners held over from an uncompleted and now uncompletable engine-room game. She beams a dead cigala she finds rigor-mortised amidst pumps and sandals in a desiccated wardrobe. She beams scans (of objects, faces, scenes) that friends have blu-texted from Argeral. The Sidereal turns out to have a good on-board projecting system, capable of both fast streaming and high-magnitude upscaling without sacrificing definition. Placing her text-compact, or just any object, on the jack-pad, Tild moves around the simulacrum it builds hovering before her, gazing at it from all sides and angles, even underneath: she spends hours splayed on the floor in dreamy study of various forms, their curves and masses – study made still dreamier by her ingestion of the contents of the philtres she’s brought with her. Back on Argeral, Tild was both wild child and decorated student, first of all her year in quadrive and alkimia; until Tszvetan and his crew turned up to head off her diploma-path with Louis Q’s proposal, she’d been a magisterial candidate at the Academy, investigating for her disertatiõ the mineral and molecular composition of her planet’s signature power source and medium, breaking charge’s field down into components, teasing from these integrants derivatives several of which turned out, when ingested, to produce effects that, from a psychoactive point of view, could be called interesting …
Nor is she all brain, though. It might seem like whimsy, or a fascination with its structure and articulation, that prompts her to spend more time perusing the projection of the pendant hanging by her neck than she does the beamed likeness of anything else – but there’s a darker reason for this. The pendant casts, in intimate anatomic detail, the skull of her uncle Merhalt – uncle who, as she has just had cause to inform Tszvetan, perished in the most recent conflict between their respective planets. Merhalt was just three years older than her, more a brother than an uncle: they grew up together, frolicking in royal brinquedotecques and gzhiardini. When she learnt that he’d taken his place among the millions of other victims of this pointless space-grab out in Saraõ, she cried for weeks on end, refusing to leave her boudoir, shunning all visitors. What brought her out eventually was news that Merhalt’s body had arrived back, in full state, to be accorded its due funerary rites – prior to which she obtained from the crown pathologist a skull scan (he had died – unusually – in close combat, his skull’s staving by an enemy rapier bringing about his demise), which she had the royal mettalourgon cast for her in rare blue osmium.
There’s no precedent for this in Argeralian custom; it was her own eccentric plan entirely, realised by operating way beyond the limits of her royal prerogative. But realise it she did, and the pendant, intricately modelled relic, has hung from her neck ever since. Here in the Sidereal’s ambassadorial suite, she sets it down on the jack-pad and beams it out again, breaking the seal on one more philtre, the contents of which she swallows (the philtre’s aperture being small and narrow) in small, pucker-lipped sips. Then, as the skull sculpts itself out once more at waist height, larger than life-size in the room, she again sits, then lies, then slides around it, staring at the meticulously rendered set of planes, plates and panels all conjoined around a central suture running down it like a stitch before abruptly giving off to a large crater, a concavity that seems to suck into its void all planes, all lines – and yet, being formed of beamed light no less than the projection’s other areas, is as ‘present’ as them, as filled in as this whole luminous sphere that, were she to beam her own face in like detail, she would see reflected not only in her eye’s curved outer membrane but also in the tear forming against this now, just on the verge of dropping …
For the stretch following the first Observatory Summit, then, a stand-off sets in and takes hold, a kind of stalemate or (as with Tild’s Atcheque match) hiatus, interregnum, period of suspended play. The Princess mopes about her suite, gazing at formless forms; Tszvetan mopes about the upper quarters, fiddling redundantly with cockpit settings (for the most part automated), meandering along corridors that seem to multiply and grow the more he treads them, heading back again and again to the even more isolated Observatory, leaning his face against the cupole’s glass and staring into space, letting his eye rest on one point, on a planet or a vulcanoid, a tiny giant or hypergiant or subgiant, then moving it backwards to a further-outlying, tinier-still detached binary or nebula, with the effect that all the stars and clusters seem to be in constant retreat from him, from the Sidereal, each other …
‘Chill of intergalactic distance,’ murmurs Herzberg, leaning over the shoulder of Eldridge, who himself leans over that of his star coder Charlie, working keyboard and glide-pad down beneath them at his table. ‘Is there some way to, you know, accentuate …?’
‘What if you take each one of the star points,’ Eldridge suggests, ‘and increase the space between it and the next by a measure proportional to … I don’t know … time elapsed or something …’
‘We can do that,’ says Charlie. ‘With Parergon you can set relational distance-augment/time-diminish gradients. It gives you a kind of infinite perspective.’
‘But …’ Herzberg isn’t entirely happy with this idea. ‘It’s not so much infinity we want; not disappearance at the edges or the limit. More like … an invasion of what’s near by far-ness … Like all surfaces and edges are retracting, dwindling even from their own position …’
He’s thinking, partly, of the staircase scene in Vertigo, or the reverse-pull shot of Brody on the beach in Jaws. But even more he’s dredging up deep-sedimented memories of childhood meningitis: how the room, his little bedroom, seemed to fill with a voluminous expanse that simultaneously emptied it, ate it away, as though some cosmic road digger were scooping out whole chunks of there-ness, filling them with not-there craters. These craters would swell, pregnant with an absence to which his delirium acted as midwife, birthing it in sweat and whimpers right above the carpet – and then cupboard, desk, toybox and even bedside lamp would take on the aspect of unmanageably distant objects, even though they were right next to him. The illness seemed to open up a peephole on a universe of expanded vacancy, laid out somehow beside or maybe even within this one, waiting for its opportunity, its chink, its moment …
‘… a monstrous remoteness that has got all close-up,’ he’s telling Charlie. ‘Outer reaches transposed to the inner sanctums … Or as though eternity had wormed its way into each second – that’s the look I want: helpless, cold and neutral. Definitely cold.’
‘Parergon can do that, too,’ Charlie says confidently; ‘no probs.’ He types c-o-l-d in his sidebar.
The onset of the third moon cycle brings with it a change of mood. Tszvetan and Tild, quite separately but in sync, as though the course their surges, ebbs and bores will take were set by mechanisms they’re no more aware of than a tidal body is, find themselves – almost literally – crossing swords once more in the Observatory. It’s she who interlopes on him this time; unlike her, though, he notices her entry straight away, but lets her circle him a couple of times before addressing her:
‘Not far to go now,’ he comments, pointing through the chamber’s glass wall to a spot lying somewhere beyond her left ear. ‘We’re passing Acephalus already.’
She turns round and sees the planet, with its signature blue ring, but ventures nothing in reply. Eventually he adds:
‘You must be happy.’
To this line, too, she offers nothing back. Her silence, like their terse earlier exchange, seems to dictate the chamber’s gravity: the air feels heavy. After a long time she turns back from the glass to face him.
‘Are you married?’ she asks.
Tszvetan shakes his head. ‘To my work, maybe.’
‘And just what’s that?’
He gestures round the chamber, or perhaps beyond it, as though indicating all the galaxies and nebulae. ‘I navigate.’
‘And smuggle,’ she adds with a smirk that is aggressive but not hostile. ‘Your hold’s full of zeletrion and ’kwavit.’
‘It’s all charged,’ he says. ‘I’ve got the manifest.’
‘Sure,’ she laughs. ‘And if …’
The second Observatory Summit is cut short at this point by the loud wail of the Sidereal’s alarm system. It will turn out to be triggered by a short in the composting tank, easily fixed. But Tszvetan’s not to know that yet; he hurries from the chamber – leaving, as Tild notices when she, too, makes towards the hatch, his rapier on the floor. Of course, she picks it up. And, after turning it over in her hands just as she did the torquetums and dioptras during her first visit to this room, she takes it with her, back down to her suite.
Why does she do this? Hard to say. Perhaps because, since childhood, she’s got used to taking what she likes. Or perhaps, on the contrary, as not a manifestation of her birthright’s license but a reaction against circumstantial powerlessness: if she’s, effectively, a hostage to diplomacy, to realpolitik’s exchanges, then she’ll take her own sub-hostage, turn this glowing, humming thing into an object as symbolic as the Atcheque pieces. Or perhaps … perhaps because the object itself fascinates her. It’s not just the aura lent it by its lethal function; there’s something else, too, something about its shape that speaks to her, that seems to whisper the familiar, even the intimate …
In this last intuition, she turns out to be half-right – or (more correctly phrased) exactly wrong. It’s not the rapier’s form that she was recognising, but the inverse of this. When she lays it on the jack-pad and beams it out all big and holographic in her suite’s dry air, the blade’s physical qualities – its pronounced distal taper and the deep off-centre fuller running from its point of balance to its centre of percussion, or the grainy, light-martensite niye jagging in layered contours down its side – take on the aspect of the imprint left by something else. Or, rather, of the block that made that something else’s imprint in the first place, of the negative of all its pleats, folds and declivities. Instinct tells her immediately what that ‘something else’ might be. Tugging at her neck, she sweeps the rapier aside and lays the blue osmium pendant on the jack-pad in its place. Scaling up the projection, homing straight in on the skull’s fracture, she can see straight off that its topology’s the same – that is, the unequivocally corresponding opposite. And if she slides the rapier back next to it, and aligns the two together … just so … There it is, an exact fit: all of the dents and shards and pockmarks that define the skull’s deep crater, its fatal concavity, slot in precisely (amphichirally – the term jumps out at her from ghosts of lecture notes abandoned back on Argeral) to the visible units that together make the blade; they’re mirror images of one another. This is the weapon that killed Merhalt; and the hand that wielded it belonged, and still belongs, to none other than her pilot and protector Tszvetan.
This is the plot’s first crisis. And its second: it’s a double-crisis. Why? Because it’s been growing glaringly self-evident to Tild, despite all efforts to camouflage awareness of the fact amidst the billow of projected objects and the fuzz of philtre-daze, that she’s in love with Tszvetan. It started as they left Doon Leer, among the pageantry and splendour of departure, courtiers lined up in gold and scarlet robes, hautboys and tombours filling the bay with noise: the way this self-possessed but sad figure stood alone on the ramp of his vessel, half-detached, like the room in which she’s since met with him twice, from the whole ceremony, and (by extension, as though the ceremony acted as a baroque stand-in for this) from life itself. In her long, drawn-out pacing of the Sidereal’s labyrinth, she’s been both trying to lose the object of her fixation and, at the same time (as if by chance, round the next corner, on the far side of an airlock), to run into it. As has he. It’s mutual: Tszvetan, too, has grown fixated with this jag-haired princess who acts like some sister he never had, who seems to hold all rules and custom in contempt but who nonetheless can see a higher value in this royal marriage, her submission to it almost, at some scale or level, a defiance. His roaming, and her roaming, de-centre the labyrinth, have turned the Sidereal’s corridors into a Kepler field in which binary planets waltz round each other in anxious ellipses, each seeking the elusive focal point that would, if ever actually reached, result in a collision guaranteeing its cataclysmic end. Now, though, an extra weight, a Schwarzschild element, has been thrown into the mix: she’s got the rapier. At some point he’s going to have to come and get it, from her suite …
And when he does, she’ll be obliged to kill him. To do anything less would be to spit on Merhalt’s grave. As far as Tszvetan’s concerned: to follow his desire for her to its conclusion would, same thing, defile his uncle, feed him through a mangle worse even than death’s. Still, the ambassadorial quarters’ draw on him is irresistible. He reasons, knowing even as he runs the argument through his head that it’s plain bullshit, that he has to go and get the rapier, and do it discreetly; that to send one of his crew, or in any manner formally acknowledge her theft of it, risks sparking a diplomatic incident. That part is true; what’s spurious, bullshit, about it is that he knows all too well that if he goes down there and allows the inevitable to take place, a situation will blow up that’s ten times worse politically than any rapier-snatching episode …
Consequently, a second stand-off sets in, one far more charged than the last, as the stakes are now much higher – and are about to increase, since Tild, among her ottomans and eggs, has taken a decision. Out beyond Acephalus, out past even Gorgon and the Lethe Nebula, there lies a planet called Nocturnis. Beneath the hydrogen clouds of its atmosphere and the kaolinite layer of its topsoil sit compacted (and eponymous) mineral belts of noctural. Since 742 (ironically, as a consequence of the Third Saraõnic War, a sub-clause to the Landis Armistice that brought it to a close that year), Argeral has held the exploitation licence for these belts, revamping the small mining concession (noctural has niche industrial uses) that was sitting all dilapidated on the Granchap Fields, sole foothold of life, let alone civilisation, on the uninhabited outcrop. It was in Tild’s own research group at the Academy that noctural was first seriously analysed, its elements identified; and Tild herself who baptised the previously unknown one ‘thanadrine’. This compound – denser even than the osmium she wears around her neck – turned out to contain an admixture of thebanum and chalcanthitus so concentrated that its ingestion, even in trace quantities, would be guaranteed to bring about a dreamy, carefree and perhaps even fantastic but for that no less inevitable death; whence the name Tild assigned to it. Ever the student, or perhaps the danger-seeker, she’s brought an extract of it with her, a philtre-pent tincture that she’s kept, for safety reasons, separate from all the others. Digging this out now and laying it on the jack-pad, beaming it up large, moving around its replica and marvelling at its strange colouration – dense black laced with blue, not unlike the swathes of interstellar void extending all around her out beyond the Sidereal’s walls – she wonders if she’ll gain some kind of experience of these abyssal spaces, some awareness of her entering and merging with them, of oblivion itself, when she ingests it. For this is her decision: to drink the thanadrine, to rejoin Merhalt, thereby staying faithful to both her brother-uncle and, since she can neither kill nor love him, Tszvetan.
It’s back to the Observatory that she repairs in order to see the plan through. She doesn’t want to do it in the confines of her suite; far better here, amidst the constellations she’ll soon join. Stripping the philtre’s seal, popping its cap, she holds it up towards the galaxies and clusters and blank patches, toasting them all with her final gesture; then (unable, due to the philtre’s shape, its narrow aperture, to down its contents in one gulp), begins to suck-sip the thanadrine. It’s yet another sign of the extent to which their thinking, not to mention moving, has become entwined that Tszvetan bursts in on her as she’s halfway through this, and immediately (from her pallor, or the fatalistic and determined look on her face, or if not those then the convulsions starting to rack her lower body) understands exactly what she’s up to. As she stares straight at him, piercingly, defiantly, he rushes up to her and, snatching the philtre from her fingers, suck-sips its undrunk half. Even in what she takes to be her death throes, she’s astonished by this act. The two of them stand face-to-face for a few seconds; then, as Tszvetan’s calves and thighs start shaking to the same irregular beat as hers, they throw themselves into each other’s arms to wait for death.
Death, though, has other things to do. It will be several cycles before Tild, from a chance conversation she’ll have with one of Louis Q’s barons at a banquet during which her royal health is toasted repeatedly with ’kwavit, realises what has (at a bio-chemical level at least) occurred: just as the ship’s transit through the Kwador boundary line alters the composition of that liquor, so, too, has it changed the make-up of the thanadrine they’ve just imbibed. While the thebanum element seems to have been unaffected, the chalcanthitus has become, not exactly neutralised, but rather catalysed into something more akin to cantharidinus or rhodotoxina – to put it in lay terms, into an aphrodisiac. As the Sidereal rounds Ardis Minor, moon of its destination planet, and as Kern itself, sunk in the final stretch of the long night from which the rays of Fidelus will soon awaken it, heaves slowly into view, Tszvetan and Tild find themselves floating naked, clasping at each other, joining, separating, joining again as they tumble slowly through the chamber from which, Tszvetan having disabled the charge, gravity has, like duty and concern, been exiled.
This is the difficult bit. Modelling it all was relatively easy: you just build the room in CAD, drop in two bodies, set the parameters for movement, and the program does the rest. As far as lighting goes: the ray tracers have done their job, marking (in reverse) the trajectory of photons as they squirt from Fidelus, bounce off Ardis Minor and the by now far-away Acephalus, wash around the sapphire glass of the Observatory’s dome, then pass through this to be deflected or occluded by the console and the moulds of various instruments, or by the floor, or by discarded clothes that drift, course logarithm-plotted, about the chamber’s air; plus, naturally, by the floating and migrating limbs and torsos of the dis- and re-entwining lovers. That all works just fine. The difficulties start when you go analogue; when human bodies, with their flesh that knows nothing of asymptotes and their parabolas, enter the picture and start wobbling and flapping over the whole equation. They’ve brought in the finest, the industry apex: mo-cap performers from the fjords, from Bergen, whom they’ve rigged up and manipulated through the movement sequences the software scripted. But it looks awful, even if you discount all the straps and cages. For one thing, their skin and muscle, toned though these may be, still sag downwards at every opportunity – we’re not in zero gravity here, after all. The A.D.s have tried all kinds of fixes, even stitching threads into flesh-coloured leotards and pulling upwards at the spots where droops are most egregious; but this just gives you a chicken-skin look whose repulsiveness runs counter to the scene’s required eroticism. For another thing, even when they’ve adhered to their assigned paths with what to the naked eye may seem complete precision, there’s still massive deviation. Actual bodies just won’t do what’s asked of them; even complying, they set up folds and kinks and barriers in all the wrong places, which plays havoc with the light path, which in turn trashes the whole set-up that Eldridge’s guys have been, meticulously and at great expense, constructing for the last few weeks. And then, above and beyond all that, it just doesn’t seem right; the movement, taken as a whole, doesn’t in any way suggest that all this tumbling and twining’s really orbiting around a central and impassioned act of coitus.
‘Looks like a puppet porn show!’ Herzberg shouted when he saw the rushes.
‘The window of a butcher’s shop during an earthquake,’ Eldridge concurred. ‘Haunches and carcasses all bumping up against each other!’
‘Rag-dolls spinning’ – Herzberg again – ‘in a dryer!’
So they’ve defaulted, on the sly, back to the virtual; or at least to the virtual archive of a pre-existing scene they never themselves staged, nor even witnessed. No one did – discounting the participants, who didn’t really ‘witness’ it as such. Phocan has slipped them, in the strictest confidence, some files that he said were gathering dust on the Pantarey server, out-takes from a previous job whose purpose Eldridge and his team can only guess at. What they show, in fully captured and evented detail, is two human figures, male and female, copulating in every position that might be imagined, plus a few that none of them ever thought possible before viewing this cache. What’s so useful about it from the DZ team’s perspective is that, rather than try to push two floating bodies, virtual or real, together – that is, to do this from a starting-point of their not being conjoined, and to make their conjunction seem convincing – they can instead, like the ray tracer, work backwards, throwing the whole process, its causation, into reverse: start with bodies plausibly (because actually) joined in coital union, and work outwards from that point in order to extrapolate approach and exit angles and trajectories, a bit like they did with vessels entering and leaving Doon Leer’s harbour. It’s a canny move: since they’ll only be using Pantarey’s off-cuts as a foundation stone, embedding their core moments beneath layer after layer of morph and render until the original’s completely (in terms of recognisability) buried, there’s no danger of anyone crying IP-infringement foul downriver. The team isolate positions, movements, thrusts, and build outwards from these, constructing graceful, tender sequences, elaborated to the point that they can drop both Bergen mo-cappers’ and CAD-programmed bodies, or at least parts of them, back in. Then comes the light: twenty coders are right now, in one way or another, helping to reintroduce this into the newly configured mix, splash it back over fresh topologies, a newfound land of curves and edges either roving on their own or set in motion by the POV that roams in loops and gyres round the Observatory’s chamber and beyond the dome of this, out into space, now looking in on the two lovers through the glass, now turning outwards, flaring into rings and starbursts as it rotates to face Helio-D directly, now graining up as it rolls onwards away, back round towards the Sidereal, Kern’s arced and hazy surface in the background …
‘Hang on a minute,’ Ben Briar smells another rat here. ‘What the fuck is that?’
‘Lens effect,’ Herzberg informs him.
‘It looks really good,’ adds Charlie.
Briar purses his lips, as though he, too, had been necking some bitter philtre. Choosing his words carefully, he enquires:
‘And why …?’
It falls to Herzberg to step up and defend the visual aberrations:
‘I’d have thought you would approve: it’s realistic – these blemishes are what you’d actually get if you stationed a camera just there.’
‘So,’ Briar snatches at these incriminating words, ‘we’re to suppose that there’s a camera, a real, actual camera, in space, floating conveniently next to these two lovebirds’ nest? Is that part of the plot? If so, then why not show its gantry, or its stabiliser, or just have the time-code flashing on the image?’
In fact, he’s not a million miles off here, although not in the way he thinks. A camera is part of the plot – several cameras, some protruding bulbously from ceilings of the Sidereal’s corridors, their presence plain for all to see, others less evident, or not evident at all, secreted grub-like inside wall panels and rivets, rails and hanging tubes, or even hovering in plain sight yet, being nanoscopic, underneath perception’s radar. Tszvetan’s no fool; he knows that the Kern authorities, and Louis Q himself, are keeping tabs on him – and knows, too, that his uncle has turned a blind eye to most, if not all, of his previous misdemeanours, that a degree of wilful ignorance has always oiled the cogs of their relationship. But this … He sensed something quite strange about this mission from the outset, almost as though it had been set up, planned, like some kind of experiment in which both he and Tild would serve as lab rats, their maze-navigations constantly observed. Later, lying in quiet post-coital reverie beside her on the floor of the Observatory to which gravity has been restored, he’ll even wonder whether Louis Q was willing this to happen; whether he’s actually watching in real time and, if so, whether it’s in fury or benevolence, like a kind, indulgent god gazing down on his creatures who, imperfect (since He made them that way), have (as His great plan prescribed) screwed up … That’s later, though. Right now (to the bemusement of the crew, who know when not to reason why) he’s turned all charge off: there’s no energy, no recording or transmitting capacity; the vessel’s powerless, hanging suspended between Ardis Minor’s pull and that of Kern, whose outer atmosphere it’s grazing. Everything’s suspended – not least time, which seems to partake of the quality of light, groundless or levitated, far-flung, outcast …
Diamond, during that long week of technical induction, got all hung up on the question of instantaneity. As Phocan talked her in more detail through Pantarey’s cameras, with their four circular rows of LEDS emitting infrared at 850 nanometers, he explained the principle of 120-degree illumination, and of passive optical motion capture generally:
‘You’ve got to throw the light out and then catch it back again,’ he told her. ‘These LEDs pulse at the frame-rate of the camera, which is anything from thirty to two thousand frames per second. The speed doesn’t matter: what’s important is that whatever speed it’s running at, the pulse-rate of the LEDs is set the same.’
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘The camera throws the infrared out to the markers, and the markers bounce it back at the exact rate as that at which it’s thrown out; and at the exact same rate as that with which the camera snaps the light back and records it. That makes for … makes for …’
This was a prompt: he was waiting for an answer. She knew the one he wanted, and supplied it:
‘Instantaneous capture?’
‘Instantaneous capture, spot on. You don’t look convinced.’
She didn’t – wasn’t. After chewing on her tongue for a few seconds (a trait her girlfriend liked; it opened up a window, she said, on her cogitative processes), she ventured:
‘It’s just … If the light has to travel out towards the object, then bounce off it again, then travel back towards the camera … Well, doesn’t that take, you know, time?’
Phocan laughed.
‘But Lucy, it’s travelling at the speed of light. That makes it instantaneous.’
He’d still said then and back, though. And again: throw the light out, then catch it back, again … But that was just words. To all intents and purposes, he was right: she saw that. Yes. And yet … it worked fine, the logic held tight if you were capturing the motion of a gymnast swinging round a pommel horse two yards in front of you, or hostage-taking extras dragging hostage stand-ins round a simulated embassy, or even a control drone in the sky two miles up. But what if you went deeper than the sky, further away? Each photon from the sun takes eight minutes and twenty seconds to reach Earth; sixteen-forty to bounce back. So light from Sagittarius, Auriga, Cassiopeia …? Years, centuries, millennia, immeasurable stretches: by the time those LED-ringed cameras have snapped their bounce-rays up again the Earth probably won’t even be there any more. The principle’s no different with the gymnast; the distance may be shorter, but the mechanics are the same: emission, then recapture, all conducted at a pace that’s ultimately no less limited than that of sound, or of molasses, or cars crawling up Finns Business Park’s drive, over the bumps … She kept her counsel, but retained the quibble henceforth as a grit of secret certainty: that structural delay is built into the process; that, even when it’s playing out at a level beneath the detectable, the measurable, it’s still there …
This is the level Tszvetan and Tild are occupying right now, the time-zone they’re inhabiting: the zone of the delay, of light’s slow transit. Since there has been no bed, nor couch, nor even floor beneath her during this magnificent and weightless tryst, Tild’s had the impression that what’s supporting her, providing base and traction every time she pulls Tszvetan down towards and into her or, hovering above him, descends once again to dock on his set body, is nothing other than the planes and cushions of the light that’s reconfiguring itself around them so accommodatingly. It hardens into banks and columns when required, or billows out, when that’s what their movements and positions ask of it, into soft, downless pillows, undulating waves that in turn dissipate when heads or arcing backs no longer need them. The light’s both prop and medium of their lovemaking; at one point, opening her eyes suddenly as she throws her head back, seeing a beam shoot out through the dome’s sapphire glass and break into a fine scintilla-dust beyond it, she’s struck by a conviction that this light is pleasure itself, reified. If it plays that role for her, it also plays the role of safety: swaddling them, holding and hiding them inside its dazzle, it keeps consequence at bay. What law requiring plain, diurnal optics could penetrate this fine-mesh cradle to disturb its frequency, undo its tangled luminescence? In the last moments before Kern’s tractor beam locks on to the Sidereal, as she drifts off into sleep, this luminescence seems to open up still more around her, and grow deeper: an abyss that, even as she sinks into it, bears her up.