Luseferous had had his genitals enhanced in all sorts of ways. One improvement was that he carried glands inside his body which allowed him to produce many different secretions which his ejaculate could then carry into the bodies of others (but whose effects he was proof against, obviously), including irritants, hallucinogens, cannabinoids, capsainoids, sleeping draughts and truth serums. He went briefly into the little-death little-trance, the petit mal which allowed him to select one of these, and chose the last-mentioned, the truth drug. He took the girl anally; it was faster-acting that way. And discovered that she really did believe in the Truth. Though it also emerged that she thought he was horribly ancient and weird-looking and a frightening, sick-minded old sadist and she absolutely hated being fucked by him.

He thought about inseminating her with thanaticin, or employing one of the physical options his remade penis made possible: the shaved horsetail, perhaps. Or just ejecting her into the vacuum and watching her die.

In the end Luseferous decided that letting her live with such constant degradation was punishment enough. He’d always said he preferred being despised, after all.

He would make her his favourite. Probably wise to put her on suicide watch, too.

* * *

The Dwellers held that the ability to suffer was what ultimately marked out sentient life from any other sort. They didn’t mean just the ability to feel physical pain, they meant real suffering, they meant the sort of suffering that was all the worse because the creature undergoing the experience could appreciate it fully, could think back to when it had not suffered so, look forward to when it might stop (or despair of it ever stopping — despair was a large component of this) and know that if things had been different it might not be suffering now. Brains required, see? Imagination. Any brainless thing with a rudimentary nervous system could feel pain. Suffering took intelligence.

Of course, Dwellers didn’t feel pain, and claimed never to suffer, except in the trivial sense of suffering fools because they were part of the family, or experiencing the deleterious physical and mental effects of a serious hangover. So, by their own reckoning, they weren’t really sentient. At which point the average Dweller, assuming without question that they were absolutely self-evidently the most sentient and intelligent things around in anybody’s neck of the woods, would just throw their spine-limbs out, shake their mantle ruff and start talking loudly about paradoxes.

He faced to spin, carried in the jet stream at five hundred kilometres per hour. Motionless. He side-slipped, found a small eddy, just a curl, a tiny yellow-white wisp a couple of klicks across in the great empty skies of orange and red and brown. He moved through the gas. It felt slick against the arrowhead’s skin. He let the eddy carry him round in a slow gyration for a while, then pointed down and fell, twisting slowly as he went, down through the hazes and the clouds and the slowly thickening weight and press of gas, down to where the temperature was suitable, where he levelled out and did something he had never done before; he opened the cover of the little gascraft and let the atmosphere in, let Nasqueron in, let it touch his naked human skin.

Alarms were beeping and flashing and when he opened his eyes they stung in the dim orange light that seemed to shine from all around. He still had the gillfluid in his mouth and nose and throat and lungs, though now he was forced to try and breathe by himself, just his chest muscles against the pull of Nasqueron’s gravity field. He was still connected to the gascraft by the interface collar, too, and, when he could not raise himself up from the bed of shock-gel, he made the little arrowhead tip gradually towards its nose, so that he was propped three-quarters of the way towards a standing position.

Blood roared in his ears. His feet and legs protested at the weight as he was slowly forced down through the gel until he was partly standing on the far end of the cramped coffin shape that contained him.

Now he could force himself away from the mould. He used his elbows, forcing himself forward. The stinging in his eyes was making them water. Tears at last. Shaking with the effort, he pulled at one sticky-slippy strand of the gillfluid where it disappeared into his right nostril, and opened his mouth, gulping some of the gas.

Nasqueron smelled of rotten eggs.

He looked around, blinking the tears away as best he could, the interface collar sucking at his neck, trying to keep contact while he tried to look up and out. It was a muddy-looking old place, Nasqueron. Like a big bowl of beaten egg, with a load of liquid shit stirred in and little drops of blood spattered throughout. And sulphurous on the palate. He let the gillfluid snap back, filling his nose, granting him pure oxygen-rich air again, though the stench still lingered.

He was sweating, partly from the exertion, partly from the heat. Maybe he should have chosen to do this a bit further up. Now his nose was tingling, too, as well as his streaming eyes. He wondered if he could sneeze with the gillfluid inside him. Would it come splattering up out of him, some ghastly lung-vomit, ejected, left drooped over the side of the gascraft like some pale blue mass of seaweed, leaving him to gasp and choke and die?

He could hardly see because of the tears now, Nasqueron’s noxious skies finally drawing from him what he had not been able to express for himself.

All of them.

The whole Sept.

They’d made the move to the Winter complex early. The warhead had fallen there, killing all of them: Slovius, Zab, Verpych, all his family, all the people he had grown up with, all those he had known and loved through his childhood and as he had grown, all the people who had made him whoever he now was, whatever he had been, until this moment.

It had been quick. Instantaneous, indeed, but so what? They had felt no pain but they were dead, gone, beyond recall.

Only they were not beyond recall. He could not stop recalling, he could not cease bringing them back to life in his head, if only to apologise. He had suggested to Slovius that they get away from the Autumn House. He’d meant a neutral place, some hotel or university complex, but they’d gone to another of the Sept’s Seasonal Houses instead — a compromise. And that had killed them. He had killed them. His well-meant advice, his desire to care and protect, and to be known to have thought of this, had taken them all away.

He thought of just letting the craft tip further over, beyond ninety degrees, letting himself fall out, jerked down by his own mass, hurtling him plummeting downwards into that great sucking breath of gas-giant gravity, the gillfluid wrenched from him, perhaps taking some parts of his lungs with it as it ripped away, tearing him apart and letting him fill the bloody, ragged remains with alien gas for his last scream — falsetto, like the voice you got when you sucked helium from a party balloon -as he plunged into the depths.

The signals and messages had finally caught up with them round about the time he’d been floating through the wreckage of Valseir’s wrecked study. All the shocked mailings, all the garbled queries, all the official notices, all the messages of support and sympathy, all the requests and follow-up signals asking for confirmation that he was still alive, all the news mentions, all the Ocula’s revised orders: they had all come through in a flood, a great tangled knot of incoming data, held up by the Shrievalty’s default secrecy, especially in a time of threat, the usual chaos of Dweller communications in general and the particular breakdown in the smooth running of signalling protocols transmission that always attended a Formal War, an effect always at its most extreme within the war zone itself.