2007. Dangerous Games

THE ICHNEUMON AND THE DORMEUSE by Terry Dowling

One of the best-known and most celebrated of Australian writers in any genre, the winner of eleven Ditmar Awards and three Aurealis Awards, Terry Dowling made his first sale in 1982, and has since made an international reputation for himself as a writer of science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror. Primarily a short-story writer, he is the author of the linked collections Rynosseros, Blue Tyson, Twilight Beach, and Wormwood, as well as other collections such as Antique Futures: The Best of Terry Dowling, The Man Who Lost Red, An Intimate Knowledge of the Night, and Blackwater Days. He has also written the novels Beckoning Nightframe, His Own, the Star Alphecca, and The Ichneumon and the Dormeuse. As editor, he also produced The Essential Ellison, and, with Van Ikin, the anthology Mortal Fire: Best Australian SF. Born in Sydney, he now lives in Hunter’s Hill, New South Wales, Australia.

In the tense story that follows, he shows us that there are some games you can never stop playing, whether you want to or not.

THIS time was different. This time on his way past the tombs, Beni turned left, ignored the guard Stones of the nearer mounds and headed down the path through the trees to the wide low tumulus where her tomb was.

He granted that the Stones had him, though nothing showed it. The tumulus was quiet under the hot afternoon sun; the trees, the grass barely stirred; the fields stretched away to meet the sky. The only movement was the heat shimmer on the other tomb mounds and the endless pull of the sentry Stones.

The Nothing Stones were neither stones nor quite filled with nothing, though that was the sense they gave, all sixteen of them, low basaltic pillars two metres high, as wide as his shoulders, as deep as his thigh, standing in the usual henge circle around the foot of the tumulus itself.

Their onyx-black, outward-facing sides were filled with stars, converging points of light, and while Beni would not look into those glossy midnight fields, he knew that if he remained, if they didn’t have him already, the darkling, star-ridden massebots would solve his mysteries, totes and sly conditionings and come to snatch him away, pulling, pulling, grabbing at sight and mind, close obsidian in the hot afternoon.

Always assume the Stones have you, Ramirez had said, told him now in memory, the greatest tomb-robber of them all, and Beni did so, leaving it to his autonomic tote systems to sort out. If they had him in a trance loop, he’d probably soon know. He continued through the perimeter henge, leaving the deadly megaliths at his back, and headed down the access ramp to the black gulf of the doorway.

Doorway not door. None of the old tumulus tombs had ever had doors. Beni stood before the quiet, porcelain-smooth, darkened throat in the side of its vast, low hill and called out.

“Dormeuse! Dormeuse! You have a visitor!”

The words echoed against the ceramic, died. There was only stillness, silence again, smooth cool midnight before him, daylight and blazing summer behind.

Beni, tech’d and toted, wearing a flamer he’d been told he probably wouldn’t use, carrying a metre-long touchpole over his back as nearly all tomb-robbers did, just in case, now brought up his wrist display, saw what the optics gave.

Classic plan clear and sure. Free of the Stones too, if he could trust the readings. It was the standard schema confirmed by all the survivors (most of all by Ramirez himself, one of the very few to make it back totally unharmed) as the basic Tastan design: stretch of corridor, peristyle hall, corridor, burial chamber.

Simple. Direct. Two hundred metres, fifteen, another hundred, then the ten-metre circular chamber: the classic Tastan biocromlech. Simple. Linear. Very deadly.

For there would be traps, illusions, sensory and neural tricks. Standing there, Beni ran the latest figures again, unchanged, of course, since the last postings, but you never knew when new data might be collated and added-the town’s comp systems were constantly at it. Outright death with bodies recovered still stayed at 12% of annual penalties, selective maiming and stigma-the ‘souvenirs,’ 14% (but at least you returned), failure to return at all was still 63% (up 2% on last year’s average-things did change), failure to enter the tomb but believing so, 11%.

Beni cleared that, studied the simplified plan again-spinal access corridor (axial, porcelain-smooth), vertebrate peristyle (handsomely corbelled, and otherwise featureless but for the fourteen columns, seven to a side, and the intaglio relief on each of the back walls), more corridor, finally the central tholos, the skull chamber: unavoidable analogy and another of Ramirez’s terms, just as he had been the one to revive the old names: tholoi, tumuli, henge megaliths, cromlechs, dolmens, going through the old databases, going on about Celts, Myceneans, Etruscans, whoever they were, much older peoples than the Tastans.

Beni flicked random selections, chance plan superimpositions, hoping to trick any tomb override. The defences were clever but they were old.

No change. The classic plan remained. No apparent change.

What would Ramirez do now? Beni wondered again, again, again, putting it off, avoiding. And, finding that he was doing so, made himself take the first step, found the others easier, was soon leaving the square of warm daylight far behind. His cap-light struck out ahead, illuminating the corridor, the smooth and off-white walls; his footsteps echoed off the cool ceramic, carrying him into night, into the underworld of the vast low funerary hill.

“Dormeuse?” he called. “You have company, Dormeuse!” Called it over and over, as Ramirez suggested he do.

“Not so loud,” a voice finally said, and a host flashed on beside him, a startling mummiform of light, gaining resolution, female distinction. “I’m trying to sleep.”

She was lovely, as perfectly formed, idealized, as Ramirez had said she would be, the tall glowing enantios intercept of an auburn-haired woman in middle-age or backtracked to about 45, with an open, pretty if not wholly beautiful face and eyes like blackest glass, but a gentle gaze all the same, with nothing like the cold arrogant manner of intercepts the grim-faced ‘souvenired’ veterans back in town had told him about.

Beni glanced down at his scanner, glad to see the basic plan confirmed, even if not to be trusted, never to be trusted, and kept on walking. The intercept ‘walked’ with him, fully formed now, smiling like a curious servant, which is exactly what she was. It was. She.

“Someone has been talking to you,” she said. “You’re too confident.”

“But new to this all the same. I need as much help as I can get.”

“I have much more experience. Listen. Turn round now. I’ll let you go. Promise.”

Beni smiled. Even without the advice he’d been given, he would have found the offer unacceptable, though it actually did happen now and then. Sometimes did. Justified the old saying that even the tombs had a bad day occasionally.

“Don’t believe you. Won’t do it. Thanks.”

The display flickered but held, his reader sorting, sorting, seeking any other valid plan, if only as a split-second glimpse.

“Last chance,” she said. “Keep going and I’ll have you.”

“You probably already do,” Beni said, heart pounding, afraid and exhilarated, entranced by the image, forcing himself to talk down at his scanner display, avoiding the eyes. “The Stones’ll have me if they don’t already.”

“Do you know what souvenir I have planned for you?”

“Please, Dormeuse. Do what you must, but enough of these threats.”

And sure enough, the intercept changed tack.

“You see no ethical problem with this, do you?”

Beni smiled at the shift, gave the rote answer. “There has never been a time where one age and culture hasn’t plundered the remains of another.”

“But why? There’s no wealth here. Nothing you can use. No gold, jewels or funerary possessions. Forget the rumours. Not enough precious materials in the circuitry and hardware. Certainly nothing accessible to you. No meaningful tech knowledge.”

“I know.”

“So why? Why do you use the term ‘tomb-robbers’ if-?”

“I prefer the ‘reasonable’ to the ‘threat’ mode, but could you bring on the next phase? I do need to concentrate.”

The phantom hovered, seemed to walk. “Such an arrogant young man. Someone has been talking to you. But I’d really like to know.”

Arrogant? Beni stared down at the display and considered it. Overconfident perhaps. Optimistic. Determined to be among the best. But hardly arrogant. “What have others said? Ramirez managed it. What did he say?”

“He was courteous but wouldn’t talk to me as freely as you seem prepared to. He probably suspected a voice trap, some trance dislocation induced by word pattern, tone and timbre. You don’t seem to fear that.”

“There were others though, Dormeuse.” The maimed ones, he didn’t add. Barlow, Deckley, Kylow, Soont, the others, all skilled men and women, all souvenired. “What did they say?”

“Again, not too much,” the phantom answered. “Concentration does that, I suppose. And fear. I gather it is some emblematic thing, using the term ‘tomb-robber’ and all. You’re stealing the chance to do it, aren’t you? Stealing the privilege. The mystery of another age. Some said it’s rites of passage. The tombs are here, they said. Intact. Penetrable yet at the same time impenetrable ultimately. One age scorning another.”

“Scorning? They said that?” Beni found it hard to imagine any of those bluff or dour survivors back in town saying that. He was impressed anew. “But, Dormeuse, you’re the one who must feel something like that surely. Scorn.”

“A sentry profile can’t. I’m just a print of my original; my job is to represent my occupant’s self. Keep her safe. Or me, depending on how you view architectural psychonics.”

“But no body, I’m told. Just the stored personality index.”

“Ah, little hunter. I recognize a question when I hear it. One age does plunder another. You, too, would have my secrets. Perhaps that is what you come for, the chance to steal knowledge of my day, get the old sentry intercepts talking. Yet such a risk. Death and injury on the chance of just a little something more about the Tastan past.”

A stab of youthful defiance surged up, made Beni want to stay silent then, but, like countless others before him, he did want to know. He had to ask. “Your body is here?”

“Curious and stubborn, like all who come calling. Why should I tell? Perhaps the people of my day did preserve the body as well. Or the head. Who knows? We may have had cryonics long before we could code personality. The others you spoke to said what?”

“Dormeuse, I’m new to this. A lot of the veterans in town won’t talk to me. They only sell what they know. I can’t afford them.”

“But, little one, you’re in this far. I know you won’t believe me but you’re past the Stones. You’re very well prepared tech-wise, my systems show. You’ve accessed a third-level intercept response from me. I frankly didn’t expect that. You have to have the advice of others.”

Beni felt his heart pounding. Could it be true? In this far! Free of the Stones. Could it?

“Ramirez,” he said, deciding she’d probably guessed it already. “One day he stopped on the way past my family’s farm. I was in the orchard. I reminded him of a son he’d lost, he said. He told me things about the tombs. About your tomb. He was giving it up at last, he said, going away. But he told me of you, Dormeuse. Of all the tombs yours was the one, he said. He was an eidetic, as you probably guessed. Perfect recall. Helped him with variants in the tomb plans when there were some, but more with the characteristics of the intercepts, their features and mode changes. He drew your likeness for me. Your image’s likeness.”

“Why, Beni. Don’t tell me you’re infatuated? In love?”

“It’s not that! It’s complex. I was without a father. He was without a son. We just talked.”

“Oh stop! Stop! Don’t tell me. And I became mother and wife! I love it. Midwife to hunters.”

Beni clenched his jaws in anger. They walked in silence awhile down the ceramic corridor, him concentrating on his plan readings, glancing up at the passage ahead, glancing back down, up, down, she flowing beside him, a spindle of light with eyes like onyx.

“You said it was complex,” she said after a time, coaxing, sounding just contrite enough. Perhaps he had accessed a new mode from her.

“Then I don’t know why I’m here. All my life it was what the best of us did. The tombs were something you couldn’t ignore, how’s that? I’ve walked past yours probably a thousand times. More than a thousand over the years. Yesterday I finally decided to try. Today I came out here again.”

“Your point, little hunter?”

“Our own culture formed around the leavings of yours, Dormeuse, but yours keeps intruding. Your language has virtually replaced ours. Do you know how insufferable something like that is? Can you imagine how it’s become for us? Competing with our past?”

“You’re telling me, little one. I’m sure it’s happened before. I seem to recall something about the European Renaissance being in effect a rediscovery of the wisdoms of earlier civilizations in Greece and Egypt. Though I believe that was a very positive thing, probably nothing as desperate as this.”

Despite her disparaging words, Beni preferred this mode, this kind of directness. Ramirez had told him to push for it, that the host would treat him differently once he accessed it.

“My father died over in 37. Left our orchard one day, just upped and turned tomb-robber, tomb-visitor, whatever term covers it. It’s what more and more of us do. Spent all we had on maps, comp and the best sentry tech he could get. I didn’t find out till later! A neighbour came over and told me he hadn’t come out of 37. I didn’t even know he’d gone in, been planning it all those years. So I ask you: why would he do that? Why do any of us?”

“But I’m asking you that, little hunter.”

“Don’t call me that. I’m Beni.”

“ Beni. So as well as being in love you’re in hate and loss. Potent mixture. Think of it though. I’m five hundred years in your past, yet held accountable, made responsible somehow for a boy losing his father centuries later. And, marvellous paradox, without me, without the loss and envy, it seems your life, all your lives, would be lacking in purpose.”

“That’s not it.”

“Would be meaningless.”

“That’s not it!” The cry was swallowed in the ebbing, flowing, warm ceramic night. The thief had stopped walking at last, stood grimly silent. The ghost hovered, drifted, spoke.

“Maybe not. But perhaps you fear so. All your people. So you come here and test yourselves, steep yourselves in the mystery, could that be it? Plunder us from time to time. Carry out acts of astonishing vandalism.”

“I haven’t done that.” Beni started walking again, drew the phantom along with him.

“No, Beni. You haven’t yet. Thank you.”

“Ramirez didn’t.”

“No. I agree,” she said. “A lot don’t. You’re different to most. Ramirez was, both of you are, that curious blend of romantic and”-she said it very gently-“innocent. After something else.”

Doesn’t mean I won’t though, he almost said, felt he should say it, a young man scared and confused. But didn’t. “So what are we after then, Dormeuse?”

“Back to that, are we? Both wanting the same question answered.”

“I’m afraid so.” He continued walking, watching the scanner.

“All right. I allow you’re motivated by the quest, by envy and reprisals against the past, the need both to have the past mysterious yet know it. I allow disenchantment, rites of passage, because it’s there, all that. But we’re generalizing. It doesn’t tell me why you’re here, does it? Why Beni is here as an individual.”

Because I want to win, he could have said. Be up there among the greatest of them all: Ramirez, Callido, Asparan. But again didn’t, feared sounding arrogant, brash, deluded like so many who came here. He was after something more. He was.

“You’re being gentle with me, Dormeuse, so I’ll try to find an answer. A real answer.”

“Please do. And my name is Arasty. ‘Dormeuse’ means ‘sleeping woman’ in an ancient language. Which is what I am, just as you are ichneumon.”

“I’m what?”

“Ichneumon. Another very old word. Means ‘hunter’ or ‘tracker.’ A small animal that used to hunt along river banks. Ate the eggs of crocodiles.”

“Of what?”

“No matter. Beni and Arasty. We’re here now and, yes, I’m being gentle because you are.”

“But it’s a mode as well. Tactical.”

“Yes. It is.” The black eyes glittered.

“You could stop me?”

“I’m sure I can.” Glittered.

“Yet the fact is you want us here.”

“Oh, tell me why.”

“Not yet.”

“I’m curious. Tell me why.”

“I need to concentrate.”

For ahead, his cap-light’s glow fell on something different at last, caught in strange verticals, made new shadows for his eyes and tech to fathom.

He had reached the peristyle hall.

Beni had expected it to be little more than a widening of the axial corridor, with the seven pillars on either side keeping the passageway’s alignment from entranceway to central tholos. But when he entered, he found it went back even deeper behind the smooth featureless columns than his stylized display suggested, just as the corridors were so very much longer than the plan showed. The walls shone with the same vitreous pallor as the corridor, but opposite each other in the centre of each back wall was the circular intaglio motif Ramirez had told him of.

The intercept appeared beside him while he stood exploring one of the grooved mandalas with a finger.

“Know what that is?”

“Ramirez told me. It’s a maze. The classic seven-ring design. The archetypal unicursal maze built round a cross and four points. Used by lots of ancient peoples, the Romans, the Cretans and Syrians, the Irish, the medieval Christians-”

“Yes, yes. So what is its significance? Did Ramirez tell you?”

Beni smiled. “A unicursal maze has a single path from the entrance to the centre. It looks complex but is really very direct.”

“Why it appealed to the Tastans too.”

“I’m sure.”

“ Beni, I fear you’re an optimist.”

“What do you mean?”

“You see it as something complex being ultimately very simple. Like your comp reading there.”

“So?”

“Why not a simple path made difficult. Look at your comp now.”

Beni glanced down, saw with a stab of alarm, panic, sudden terror, a new reading. He keyed randoms, saw only the new double-peristyle configuration.

“This does get interesting,” she said. “Oh, by the way, ‘ichneumon’ also refers to a parasitic, hymenopterous insect that lays its eggs on another’s larvae, using it as food for its own young as they hatch. Nice thought, yes? Little hunter.” And she vanished.

Beni had been told this would probably happen, the host’s hunt-mode surfacing, solicitous, caring, then cold, callous, vindictive, seeking to undermine any sense of hope.

He strode on, left the columned hall, plunged into the next length of corridor, just the tiniest dagger edge of doubt pushing through the confidence Ramirez had given him. What if there were a second peristyle hall? What if the tomb plan actually shifted, shunted him from one course to another, on and on? The mound was large enough.

Ramirez had spoken of it. It was a doubt he could still push aside. The tholos, the skull chamber, would be ahead. Not far.

The yellow cone pushing ahead became brighter, strengthening, whitening, as the host flashed in.

“Can we resume, Beni? You said that we want you here. Tell me why?”

Beni did not look at the intercept. He walked on, glancing at his display, then ahead, corridor, display, repeating that. He might have stayed silent, punished her for the trickery with the plan. But he sensed, just as Ramirez had told him, that it would probably be the worst thing to do. The tomb profiles liked to talk.

“It occurs to me, Arasty, that a sentry program would want visitors to test itself against, that the self whose tomb this is would have designed the tomb so its sentry profile would be exercised, challenged, kept entertained and satisfied. It’s what I’d do.”

“That’s a very smart observation. What made you think of it all of a sudden? Or was it also something-”

“I asked Ramirez about it that day in the orchard. Mentioned it before he did. We talked about what the tombs really were. He told me that your intercept, Dormeuse-Arasty-would appear at various times, run different modes-”

“And walk with you like this?”

“Not necessarily. Some intercepts did, he said. He also told me that whoever could code personalities and structure reality perception would not bother with ancient mortuary forms-corridors, burial chambers and such like-unless they were playing at something, wanted to invite plunderers.”

“Again, very shrewd. He didn’t say much when he was here but I miss this Ramirez. You’re both right. We do want you here. We give each other purpose.”

Beni watched his display for the slightest flicker, let his peripheral vision guide him. “We are your future. We let you exist in time.”

“Empowering each other. Yes, Beni. I like that. Like the fish and the fisher. Here for each other.”

“So let me get on with it, Arasty. You try to stop me. I try to reach the core chamber.”

“And what? Put your name up there with Ramirez’s. Scrawl it on the watch screen and hurry out again? Did he tell you he did that?”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Did he tell you what else he did? Everything he did? You said Ramirez drew my face. Did he love me too, do you think? This image from an ancient age?”

Which part to answer? She was distracting him with her intriguing remarks, possibly giving deliberate untruths to unnerve him. “I’m not sure what he felt. Fascination. Determination to see you as the person who made this. Set this up for the future. It makes for a sort of intimacy. Something very powerful.”

“Intimacy. I’m flattered. I never expected this sort of-well-kinship across centuries.”

But Beni had stopped.

“What is it?” the phantom asked. “Worried that there’s no core chamber? No second peristyle?”

“I should have reached it. Show me the plan. The real one.”

“You’ve already seen it. Look.”

Again there was the alarm, the panic, terror surging up.

“You continue to make it more interesting.”

“It’s all I have, like you say. The chance to challenge, be entertained.”

Beni needed to talk it through. “One of the few things we learned from you Tastans was sealed comp technology.” He touched his scanner. “This can’t be tampered with, so you’ve interfered with my perceptual processes.”

He pressed a contact, randomized the grabs, sent surges through both equipment and self. He had practised this, did not flinch from the small electroshocks. The original tomb-plan came and went: single peristyle original, this new triple corridor display, double peristyle, single, double, triple-they flashed and flickered, cycled from one to the other.

It wasn’t his vision then-unless it was misinformation at the brain’s visual centre.

And when he looked at the phantom’s face, saw the smile under the black glass eyes, he understood her simple strategy.

“I can’t be sure now can I?”

Again, Ramirez’s words were there. Allow that the Stones have you.

Beni sighed as if in frustration and despair, closed his eyes, accessed, believed he accessed, the neural link Ramirez had given him, actually given him, a parting gift surgically implanted in the town clinic, a legacy from surrogate father to surrogate son.

The single peristyle configuration-classic Tastan grab-sat in the light of his mind’s eye. He was in the second length of corridor, so close to the chamber. He dared not linger over it in case she suspected. Again he sighed as if in frustration.

“Your decision?” she said.

“Excuse me?” Feigning bafflement, exhaustion, loss of resolve. Let her read those. The battle had been joined in earnest.

“On or back? I still may let you go. Perhaps with a souvenir as a reminder. Or perhaps none, provided you promise to come back and talk to me again. Keep me entertained.”

Was that a possibility he dared consider? This intercept-this tomb, to make the distinction-did seem different from all accounts, rhapsodizing, showing whimsy, negotiating, pretending to, taunting like this, first one mode then another, just as Ramirez had told him she would be.

“I’m your little egg-stealer, remember. We continue.”

“Hope is always beautiful,” she said.

Beni didn’t comment, strode on five, ten, twenty metres, surely into the tholos, but would not glance at his display now, nor at her, would not consult his link. He wanted her to court him, whatever came of it. This visit had to matter. But he was in the tholos, the skull chamber, he told himself. Had to be.

Finally she spoke, easily, losing no face by it, perhaps in a new mode, he couldn’t tell, though her question suggested it.

“So, little hunter, have you ever wondered why there are only 85 tombs? The Tastan culture lasted seven centuries, at least 35 generations. Why only 85 tombs?”

He didn’t understand all her words. Generations. “Tell me.”

“Guess.”

“No more games.”

“Entertainment, remember? There really are only my games here. I’ll reward you.”

“How?”

“Trust that I will. I’ll give you a clue. We were not necessarily royalty. Not rulers.”

It did intrigue him. “Another caste in your society?”

“In a sense. Go on.”

Beni fought to think, pressured by the changeless, vitreous dark, by the unchanging yellow fan of his lamp showing not the tholos but only more and more corridor, its glow whitened by the added glow of the figure floating, standing beside him, seeming to.

Tholos, maze, wherever he was, the intercept really did seem to want an answer.

“Our culture is five hundred years after yours,” he said.

“Good. Yes?”

“But”-he hated saying it-“is debased by comparison. Technologically.”

“Such finesse, little hunter.”

“You belonged to a scientist caste.”

“Wrong.”

“A holy order. Priests. Sacerdotes.”

“No.”

“Criminals being punished.”

“Fool!” She said it with incredible fury. The black eyes glittered. “Don’t you know any history? What happened to our culture?”

Beni was stunned by her vehemence, the unconcealed contempt. It told him something he did not yet understand.

“You vanished,” he said, and then, to show he did know some history, what Ramirez had told him, added: “Like the Mayans. The Anasazi. Your cities were abandoned, allowed to run down; most were reduced to slag by housekeeping programs-”

“So where did we go? Our millions? Our millions, Beni?”

What did she want him to say? And millions. The Tastan millions.

“Into these tombs?” The certainty of it amazed him. “All coded in. Immortal. You’re the guardians of your race! Eighty-five repositories but housing millions.”

Arasty’s expression may have been the result of holistic psychonic printing or just some simulated response selected from a housekeeping menu, but Beni saw what looked like genuine scorn, genuine revulsion. If it were a deception then it was a subtle one, something naked, seeming spontaneous, well beyond the disapproval and impatience it resembled.

What am I missing? Beni asked himself, and with it felt a conviction. She needs me to guess. It really is important that I do. But what did she-it-want him to say? He wanted to shout the question. Didn’t dare now. All he could think of was to show humility, self-effacement, and hope for patience.

“Please, Arasty, help me more. This is important.” He hoped the compliment, his respectful tone, would do it.

The phantom watched him sidelong with her dark eyes just as a human would, as if in fact a discrete entity deciding, not a defence intercept scanning precedents, selecting options.

“You really have no idea, do you? A great culture, possibly the greatest the world has known, reaches a point where it dismantles itself, gives way to a simpler, let’s say impoverished, less sophisticated successor. Why would they do it?”

“I can only think of two answers,” he said quickly, honestly. “There was some enemy…”

“You could say that.” The intercept’s eyes flashed with interest. “Or?”

“You gained by it. It had to be progress. Something you saw as better.” And he remembered what she’d said-impoverished-and barely dared utter the words. “You became us!” Remembered what else she’d said: less sophisticated. “You simplified your culture, someone did, something, some ruling elite maybe, and became us-”

“Yes.” There was something like madness in the phantom’s darkling bits of eyes, something reckless and fervent, but Beni dared not suggest the tombs housed what remained of the Tastan’s dead insane. It was more. It had to be more. But he did not have to stumble over words to form a question. Arasty continued speaking.

“Some ruling elite, yes. An enemy, true, that culled our millions and our cultural heritage. Downgraded us all. To simple, immortal, happy folk like you-”

“Then-”

“Immortal. Happy ichneumon. But able to be maimed, killed by violence. With time to be curious, to ponder, to forget, to indulge. Happy, happy, happy ichneumon!”

“Then you’re here-”

“Go on!” Madness spun in the darkness of the eyes.

“To cull us! Prey on us! To give purpose to immortal lives! They planned ahead. Saw we would need-”

“No!” The intercept had halted in blazing fury, actually flickered, flashed off and back again. The face was rigid with a rage and suffering held in such perfect suspension that Beni was faint with the involuntary numbing terror he felt welling up. The eyes, the black false eyes, held him.

“No, little hunter. No. See it our way. To give purpose to our thwarted lives. Some kind of revenge for those few among the elite, eighty-five out of all those many, to whom the genetic treatments did not bestow immortality. Who had helped cull and simplify, then found themselves without the intended blessing, left to die in the agony of exclusion from that. From you.”

Beni saw the extent of the resolve, the old fierce hatred, that she would never let him go. He would never get to tell this story. Never even reach the central chamber. Or know he had.

“These aren’t tombs. They’re traps,” he said, understanding, remembering the other meaning to her name for him, the insect leaving behind its offspring to feed.

“Yes, Beni. Traps to lure immortals curious in their long lives. A way of striking back at time.”

And Beni felt the deep-down dread that Ramirez, some kind of Ramirez, tampered with, changed, or no-just allowed to go back unharmed-was acting as a lure out there in the bright summer days, giving hope, keeping the dream alive in others, but part of the trap, knowing or unknowing. Pray Destiny it was unknowing. Such a small shrewd price to pay, letting one or two go free, letting others go back maimed. Let the tombs have a bad day and so keep them coming.

“Be merciful, Dormeuse. Arasty.”

“I am, little hunter. With you I truly am. Normally I grant the beautiful lie, tell those I am about to rob of life, light and limb, beauty, eons of youth, of how normally death is what makes lives, cultures, ultimately defines civilization. I remind them that it’s right that immortals should reach a point of idle curiosity and need to be challenged, extended, tested. I tell them that whatever their fates individually, those I kill or hurt are helping maintain the tenor of life for all.”

“But you’re actually culling.”

“Avenging. It’s simpler.”

“Out of envy.”

“Bad enough in life. But when it’s all there is, all that’s left, it fills the largest cup, becomes a vast power. I phrase it so they think they will be spared somehow. That they are different and special. To some I even suggest that their personalities will join mine in the tomb matrix. Then, when there is hope, when vanity and optimism is there in hints and the absolute conviction of ego, then I cripple and kill, then I bring them to the worst of hells, to such terrible insurmountable despair. You I have spared this anguish, Beni.”

“Spared me! By telling me the truth?”

“Yes.”

“But I can’t believe you, can I? Not after what you’ve just said.”

“You really should. Look at your display.”

Beni did, saw how simply, elegantly, the tomb’s long-dead owner, this printing of her anyway, had expressed his dilemma.

A maze. He was in a maze. He did not know what to say.

Arasty, the ghost of her, smiled. “Well?”

“Never be importunate, I was always told. Never beg.”

“I’ve told you I’m being merciful. I might listen.”

“All right. Don’t kill me.”

“I won’t.”

“Don’t maim me.”

“I won’t.”

“Let me return.” As part of the trap, he didn’t say, refusing to go so far.

“Earn it.”

“I need to think. Concentrate.”

“Shall I leave?”

“You’d still be here. You’re in the walls.”

“True. The tomb.”

“The trap.”

“The trap, yes. My personality is coded through all this. But it would be easier for you to concentrate.”

And the intercept vanished, took away her glow, left only dim yellow lamplight, tunnelling, vitreous, intimate darkness without her darkling eyes.

Beni stopped, pretended to think, triggered his implant, saw again the plan of her tomb picked out in light, saw that he was at the central chamber, the structural heart of what this thwarted, predatory, former woman had become. Out of despair.

“Oh, Dormeuse, Dormeuse,” he murmured. “I am so sorry.” Imagining how it had to be, the eighty-five labouring over the final secret plan, the hate and loss in their hearts as all the others sailed blissfully on, away, abandoning.

What choice then. What choice now. For them both.

“We can change this,” he said, resolved, striding on to his goal, though he did believe he was already there. “We can make a start here. Try to be friends. Let me try to be that, Arasty. At least try to be that.”

“Yes,” the tomb said, the walls, the night, as he strode on in his cone of yellow light into the endlessness of the hill. “And that is why.”

OUTSIDE the Nothing Stones pull and pull and will forever pull, drawing in the emptiness of infinity, the blackness of eyes made hard, so unforgivingly hard. She is punitive and spiteful and so so determined. It is all she will ever have.

Beni strides on with his young man’s dreams-of success, of being different, better than the best, with his wonderful new dream of achieving something more, something new. He walks into night and does not see the final reading, does not know just how merciful she has been, that this time there is mercy, as much of it as there can ever be. He believes he can still be the greatest of them all. He still believes Ramirez is someone else.