Neal Asher: Brass Man

‘Our world is going to change drastically,’ he said, ‘but we will not allow that change to swamp us, to erase what we have done or what we are. We have work to do, so let’s begin.’

It was virtuality, illusion, for no projector could get close, and what point would there be in projecting holograms to that place anyway? But there was a point to this; Jack felt there was a point. Perhaps he was too much of an aesthete. Perhaps there was too much conceit in this, and just maybe Dragon owned that same conceit as much as himself and Aphran.

Whatever, Jack and the erstwhile Separatist walked on the surface of the brown dwarf. Dragon, who had rescued them just before they departed the Cull system but seemed reluctant to give them up to Jerusalem or any of the other Polity AIs patrolling this still-enclosed sector of space, seemed not to be present at all—granting them this illusory space and a definite moment of satisfaction.

‘He makes a pretty pattern,’ said Aphran, eyeing the silvery spirals and ellipses inlaid in the super-dense surface.

‘He does that. And it is a pattern that is changing.’

‘What?’ Aphran looked up.

Jack pointed. ‘Those ellipses are compressed Jain nodes. They won’t change, apparently, unless removed from this environment. They require a host and a motivating will. The rest is him still trying to survive, still trying to return himself to order.’

‘He’s alive? He thinks?’

‘In a sense, and slowly.’

‘Will he get away from here?’

Jack allowed himself a hangman’s smile. ‘Not in the lifetime of this universe.’

A golden egg clasped in one brass hand, Mr Crane walked the dusty plateaux, shady canyons and ragged mountain chains of Cull. Like a knight who slew a dragon, he slid from cold reality into bar yarn, and very quickly into legend. Those who saw that tall striding figure, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and with the bottom of his long ragged coat flapping about his lace-up boots, often agreed that a flying creature accompanied him—one much like some seen in the spaceport being built just outside Golgoth. Perhaps they thought this extra touch added veracity to their assertion that they had actually seen Mr Crane. Others pretended to believe these witnesses with the same patronizing kindness with which they believed those who claimed to have seen the Inconstant Sea.

What they had seen was real, sort of, in a sense…