Self-Destruct

They gathered in the Core as the last light was going.

It was an extraordinary sight. Archie would remember it afterward the way one remembers a wedding, in a series of bright detached images, none of which quite fit together. The vast dark dome. The silver pillar, shining. The five great cables of light, and around them, one by one, as the Key called them in, the Guardians came out of the dark.

Elena, in her scarred armor, with her sword at her side. Thomas, in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat, with a dishcloth still over his shoulder. Gregor with a hen under his arm, because he had refused to leave her. Sera, her green hands folded, her bone harp slung on her back. They stood in a ring at the foot of the pillar, in the cold radiance, looking about them like people who have walked into a very large room they have been told about all their lives.

In the center sat Matteo.

He had not moved. He sat cross-legged on nothing with the light pouring through him and his silver-ringed eyes fixed on each of his visitors in turn. He seemed to have grown clearer. The tangle had gone from his hair. His face, in the glow, was young.

"You're all here," he said softly.

"All here," said Elena.

"Then it is time."

…

"What happens to us?" said Gregor, at last.

He had set the hen on the floor of the dome. It pecked at nothing, contentedly, the only creature in the Core that seemed entirely at ease. The old man stood with his big hands hanging. He did not sound afraid. He sounded like a man asking the way to a railway station.

"You wake up," said Jin.

"In what?"

"In a bed. In New Hampshire. In a body that's, well. Healthy." He pushed up his glasses. "It's a clone. I told you. It's grown from your own cells. It isn't a copy of you; it's a house you move into. It's the same person living in it."

"Is it?"

"I think so."

"You think."

"I'm an engineer," said Jin helplessly. "I don't know the philosophy."

Thomas Crane gave a low chuckle. "That makes two of us."

"I've been a ghost in a dream for fifteen years," said Elena. "I'll take a body, whatever kind it is."

"Me too," said Sera.

She had stepped forward. She stood very straight, with her chin lifted, looking at the great column of fire. Her eyes were clear, and tearless, and shining. "I wanted to die once. I told you that. But I'd like," she paused, "I think I'd like to see what it's like to want to live."

Nobody said anything.

Zoe put her arm round her.

…

"Shall we?" said Matteo.

He rose. It was the second time he had stood, and this time it came easily. The cables rippled, and parted for him as a crowd parts for a king. He walked to the foot of the pillar, and laid his hand flat against it, and the white fire washed up his arm to the shoulder and ran into his hair and made it flame.

"I have never done this," he said apologetically. "I have only written about it."

"Will it hurt?" said Venn.

"I don't think so."

"Great."

"It will be," the old man searched, "loud."

Jin stepped to his side. He had a thin silver wand in his hand, a thing of light that he had pulled out of the dark, and he held it as a conductor holds a baton. His face was pale and set. "Right. Sequence. I'll call the consents. Elena first."

"I consent," said Elena.

A cable of green light went white, from root to branch.

"Thomas."

"I consent."

The blue went.

"Gregor."

"Consent. And thank you."

The copper.

"Sera."

"I consent." She smiled. "And thank you, Diana."

The gold.

"Matteo."

"I," said the old man, and his voice shook, and for a moment he could not go on. He lifted his head. He looked at the dark above, as though at a face he knew. "I consent. Luca, I consent. Come and get me."

The gray went.

All five cables, in a single moment, flashed white from end to end. And at the center of the Core the pillar of fire let out a long, soft, deep sound, like a great bell struck in the next room, and began to sing.

…

It was the most beautiful thing that Archie had ever heard.

It was not loud. That surprised him. He had braced for thunder. It came instead as a rising, widening chord, a dozen notes at once, each of them clear as glass, so pure that his eyes filled. It was the sound of the Tree in the wind, and rain on a pane in Ashmore, and a ship humming in the dark, and a castle waking. It was the sound of every place they had been.

The threads in the dome began to unravel.

They did it gently. A strand here, a strand there, loosened from its anchor and drifted away like dandelion down. The web grew thin. The dark between the stars grew wide. Through the gaps, as through the gaps in a dispersing cloud, a pale gray-gold light began to come, like the first light of a morning.

"It's working," said Zoe.

"It's working!"

"Is it supposed to shake like that?" cried Venn.

It shook. The whole dome heaved. The floor that was not a floor bucked and rolled, and the hen squawked, and the Guardians staggered into one another. A crack ran across the sky. Light poured through it, hard and white, and the pillar began to flicker, and the singing went up an octave, shrill and strained, and out of it came a long groaning wail like a ship's timbers giving way.

"That's not right," said Jin.

"What isn't?"

"That's the wrong, it should be dying down, it should be fading, that's," his voice cracked, "that's a runaway."

He stared at the pillar. His hand with the wand was shaking.

"It's not coming down in order," he said. "It's coming down all at once. Matteo, you said it was a cascade, but I didn't think, oh God, it's feeding itself. The consents are in. There's nothing holding it. It's," he swallowed. "It's eating the Core."

…

In the control room, forty feet underground, a small man with red hair said a very bad word.

"The readouts are all over the place!" Otis was on his feet, with his hands in his hair. "Look at it! Every channel's spiking! The Core's in free collapse! It's not going to wait for them to get out!"

"How long?" said Luca.

"I don't know! Ten minutes? Five?" The little man's voice cracked. "Doctor, they're still in there. All of them. Nine of them. If the Core goes while they're in it—"

"They will wake."

"They might not!"

"They will." Luca's voice was very quiet. His hands were pressed flat on the desk. His eyes, on the screen, were fixed on nine small points of light clustered near a bright dying star. "My brother has spent fifteen years in that place. He will not let it end like this. He knows the way. He wrote it down."

"Wrote what down?"

"The way out," said Luca. "He would not have done all this and not left a door."

He closed his eyes.

On the screen, one of the nine points of light began to move.

…

The Core was coming apart.

Light poured from the cracks. The lattice, so intricate, so delicate, so steadfast for fifteen years, was ripping loose from the dark in great glittering sheets. Pieces of it fell. They fell upward, and sideways, and nowhere, and the air was full of them, like snow in a gale. The Guardians had huddled together at the foot of the pillar with their arms round one another. Sera was singing something under her breath. Gregor had gathered the hen against his chest.

"Matteo!" Archie had to shout. "How long?"

"I do not know!"

"How do we get out?"

"The exit!" The old man was on his knees at the base of the pillar, wrestling with a cable as thick as his body. He was bleeding from the nose. "The exit is within the Core. It is a, a door in the center. It will open, when the structure releases. But someone must hold the center while it does!"

"Hold it how?"

"With a mind!" Matteo screamed. "The Core must be anchored until everyone has passed through! If it is not, the cascade closes the door! Everyone who has not gone through is lost!"

"For how long?"

"A minute! Perhaps a little more!"

"A minute," said Archie.

He looked round at them all.

They were there, in the cold shifting light, in a ring: Elena with her hand on her sword, Thomas, Gregor and his hen, Sera. Jin with his wand, shaking. Venn, white as paper, grinning with all his teeth and not meaning it. Matteo on his knees. And Zoe.

She was looking at him.

She had not spoken. She stood at the edge of the circle with the pendant blazing at her throat and her short hair streaming in the wind of the collapse, and her eyes were dark and wide and she knew. He saw her know it. He saw her face change, very slowly, the way a face changes when a sum comes out. She shook her head. It was a tiny movement, hardly more than a tremor. Her lips shaped a word.

Don't.

A minute. A mind to anchor the center for a minute, so that eight people and a hen could walk through a door.

It could be anyone. Matteo had given everything; he had no more to give. Jin was needed to read the exit. Venn was too weak, and Zoe held the Key. The Guardians had been prisoners enough. It was an arithmetic, plain and cold, and there was only one term left over.

I've been told all my life that I'm replaceable, he thought.

Perhaps, for once, that's an advantage.

And yet.

He turned his head, and looked at the ceiling of the Core, at the gray-gold light pouring through the crack. He thought of a stack of paper in a drawer, and a pencil, and the way Matteo's notes hung in the dark like the ruled pages of a book: fifteen years of work, a map of the system's own thoughts. A door in the center. A mind to hold it. A key that could open anything.

There's a loophole, he thought. There must be. He never would have written all this and left it with a single answer.

He had a minute, perhaps less. He had a hand free. He could step forward, into the pillar of white fire, and say yes. Or he could turn to the notes, and the Key, and the old man bleeding on the floor, and try to find the other way.

He did not know which would work.

He did not know that either would.