Glasshouse - Charles Stross [115]
My knees feel like rubber. I lean against the outer wall of the radial tube I’ve just climbed, feeling completely exhausted. I look up at the ceiling, almost half a kilometer up, and realize just how little it curves and how wide the basin of reality is. There are clouds in here, collecting near the tops of some of the needles. The air is slightly misty and smells of dry yeast. Strange monochromatic humps in the floor suggest hills and berms—mass reserves waiting for the giant habitat assemblers to go to work on them. I try to identify the end caps of the cylinder, but they’re lost in the haze, several tens of kilometers away. The light is coming from thousands of tiny bright points in the ceiling.
I could starve to death in this place long before I could walk out of it.
I try to rest up for a while, but unease prods me into premature motion. I know I need to try and accommodate this fatigue, but there’s an edge of panic whenever I think about Kay, or the consequences of the thing lurking in my head that (I’m half-convinced) is causing these blackouts. There’s not a lot I can do, except stay with the ladder and hope to find something more promising on the next deck up—almost a kilometer above my head. But I don’t think I’d make it.
I stumble away from the ladder, heading toward the nearest berm. Maybe there’ll be some emotional machinery near there that I’ll be able to communicate with, something from outside YFH-Polity’s frontier that’ll be able to put me in touch with reality. I try my netlink, but it’s dull and frozen, showing nothing but a crashed listing of point scores allocated to my cohort. Curious Yellow, I think dully. That’s why I can’t hear Sam when he says * * *: the score-tracking system is based on Curious Yellow.
A couple hundred meters from the berm I see signs of life. Something about the size of a taxi, consisting of loosely coupled rods and spheres, is hunching up over the crest of the deposit. It extends tubular sensors in my direction, then vaults over the crest of the hill, sensors blurring into iridescent disks, ball-and-rod assemblies spinning on its back. The balls are growing and thinning, unfolding like cauliflower heads that glow with a diffractive sheen. I stop and wait for it to arrive. I guess it’s some kind of specialized biome construction supervisor, an intelligent gardener. There is absolutely nothing I could do to stop it from killing me if it’s hostile—I might as well attack a tank with a blunt carving knife—but that’s relatively unlikely. Knowing that doesn’t make waiting easy, though.
It closes intimidatingly rapidly but rolls to a stop about three meters away from me. “Hello,” I say, “do you have a language facility?”
The gardener draws itself up until it looms over me. Florets open and close, buzzing faintly. “Who are you and what are you doing here?”
I relax very slightly. “I’m Robin.” The name feels odd, unfamiliar. “What polity is this?”
It buzzes and clicks to itself, flattening slightly at the top like a puzzled cobra. “Hello, Robin. This zone is no polity. It is ballast sector eighty nine, aboard the MASucker Harvest Lore. It is not an inhabitable biome. What are you doing here?”
No polity. I’m on a MASucker. Which means there’ll probably only be one longjump gate on the whole ship, heavily firewalled . . . I close my eyes and try not to sway on my feet. “I am trying to locate legal authorities to whom I can report a serious crime. Mass identity theft. If this isn’t a polity, what is it?”
“I am not authorized to tell you. You are Robin. I am required to ask you: How did you get here? You are showing signs of physical distress. Do you require medical