‘Oh they tried. Just because we’re not Partheni doesn’t mean we’re completely impractical,’ Trine said. ‘Originator ruins do something to the light, my dear. Something interferes with the signal. Most of my colleagues said what they received was hopelessly corrupted, devoid of information.’
‘What did the rest say?’ Idris asked automatically, suspecting correctly that he wouldn’t like the answer.
‘That a message did get through, it just wasn’t the one we’d sent. We got through a beam receiver a month. The nightmares, you know.’ Trine’s face waggled its eyebrows alarmingly, wide-eyed, and Idris decided he could have done without that.
*
As Idris didn’t sleep, he found himself on his own once the camp had settled in for the night. Without the others distracting him, he couldn’t blot out the sensation anymore. He’d felt it the moment they came in sight of the ruins – perhaps even since he set foot on-world. There was a presence to the Originator site. It wasn’t dead, though surely it had once been something far grander and was now just a worn-down stub. Whatever had made this place what it was, whatever struck fear into the Architects, it was still here. The silence he felt was the silence of something standing close, making no sound – not simply an absence of sound. And nobody knows this, except me.
Perhaps there was a whole covert research program on the subject, run out of Mordant House. But he thought not. There weren’t enough Ints, not enough Originator sites. Nobody to join the dots . . . except him. He felt as though he was on the edge of a colossal revelation – wondrous or terrible, he couldn’t say. And because no more understanding came, he just stayed on that edge. An exhaustion of suspense kept him strung out for hours, while dark turned back into dawn and then headed towards dark again. The camp, he discovered, worked for one day-night cycle and then rested for the next one. It wasn’t something that fitted well with human diurnal rhythms but, since Idris had shed those, maybe he was better suited to Jericho than anyone else.
*
‘Basically, unless it’s an emergency, we put the EM down for an hour every two days – so’s people can call their loved ones. Or their pimps and bookies,’ Robellin explained. ‘Also, we need to upload and download the science, y’know. Order supplies, get the news medios, all that. So it’s usually chocker, is what I’m saying. You getting a channel for your pilot, whether you can dodge the interference or not, wouldn’t normally happen.’
‘Is that right?’ Solace said. The tilt of her jaw suggested that Mr Punch might have something to say about that.
‘’Cept obviously we know Trine’s in a spot, and this is for him. And also . . .’ The biologist shot a sly look Idris’s way. ‘Your mate here, he’s made a discovery. Something we never guessed was even there to be discovered, eh? Shows what a shower of fucking amateurs we are. Give us another bout of free and frank with him – then when we take the generators offline, you get first go on the transmitter. Deal?’
‘Idris?’ And at least she was asking and not ordering.
‘I don’t know what I can tell you,’ Idris said to Robellin, ‘but sure.’ Then Robellin gathered an audience of geologists, biologists and Trine’s dig team, and his interrogation began. They asked him all manner of questions: about his Int senses, how he reacted to the Originator site, and on and on. True to his predictions he had precious little he could tell them, the same odd guesses and failures of description getting hopelessly mangled between mind and mouth.
‘Look,’ he explained at last, ‘it’s what being an Int is, see? There’s a place you feel, and you go to, in here.’ Poking himself hard in the side of the head. ‘Saint Xavienne was born like this, and they made the rest of us like her. As best they could.’ Seeing too many blank looks on young faces he snapped out, ‘Surgery and implants and chemotherapy and most of the time it kills you, you understand. We’re not meant to happen. You wreck people’s brains, trying to make something like me.’ Seeing their flinches or disapproving expressions and thinking, How is it you don’t even know this? Kids, they’re just kids. There was a war on, so of course they’d try anything.
He reined himself in, before he started going all crazy old man on them. ‘Those of us that lived . . . There’s this sense we have, here inside, it lets us do what we do in unspace. But most of all, it let us talk to Architects, right? To say, “Hey, we’re here. Stop doing that. You’re . . .”’ He let out a little laugh that sounded dangerously hysterical, even to him. ‘“You’re killing us. Stop killing us”， basically.’ Staring out bleakly at their uncomfortable faces. ‘These ruins you’ve got here, they’re speaking into that same space. And your gropplers and things, they hear it too. So yes, I can hear this place doing its thing, just by being here. That’s what the Architects hear too, I guess – when they come to these places? But I don’t know why I’m hearing this. Nobody knows why. If we did, we wouldn’t have to kill so many people to make a freak like me.’