Revelation Space (The Inhibitor Trilogy Book 1)

by Alastair Reynolds

She rode the spinal trunk, the four-kilometre-long shaft which threaded the entire length of the ship. She had boarded somewhere near the nominal top of the shaft (there were only 1050 levels that she knew of) and was now descending at ten decks a second. The elevator was a glass-walled, field-suspended box, and occasionally the lining of the trackless shaft turned transparent, allowing her to judge her location without reference to the elevator’s internal map. She was descending through forests now: tiered gardens of planetary vegetation grown wild with neglect, and dying, for the UV lamps which had once supplied the forest with sunlight were mostly broken now, and no one could be bothered repairing them. Below the forests, she ghosted through the high eight hundreds; vast realms of the ship which had once been at the disposal of the crew, when the crew numbered thousands. Below 800 the elevator passed through the vast and now immobile armature which spaced the ship’s rotatable habitat and nonrotatable utility sections, and then dropped through two hundred levels of cryogenic storage bays; sufficient capacity for one hundred thousand sleepers—had there been any.

“Atrium levels,” said the elevator, accessing a long-redundant record of the ship’s prior layout. “For your enjoyment and recreation needs.” “Very droll.” “I’m sorry?” “I mean, you’d need a pretty odd definition of recreation. Unless your idea of relaxation happened to be suiting-up in full vacuum-rated armour and dosing on a bowel-loosening regimen of anti-radiation therapies. Which doesn’t strike me as being particularly pleasurable.”

It was a long hike from the spinal shaft to the place where they kept the Captain. She could not take the most direct route either, since whole sections of the ship were inaccessible, riddled with viruses which were causing widespread malfunction. Some districts were flooded with coolant, while others were infested with rogue janitor-rats. Others were patrolled by defence drogues which had gone berserk and so were best avoided, unless Volyova felt in the mood for sport. Others were filled with toxic gas, or vacuum, or too much high-rad, or were rumoured to be haunted.

The miracle was that the reefersleep unit which cased Brannigan was still functional. It was a very old model, Volyova knew—sturdily built. It was still striving to hold the cells of his body in stasis, even though the shell of the reefer had ruptured in great Palaeolithic cracks, fibrous metallic growth spilling out. The growth came from within the reefer, like a fungal invasion. Whatever remained of Brannigan remained at its heart. It was bitterly cold near the reefer, and Volyova soon found herself shivering. But there was work to do. She fished a curette from her jacket and used it to burn off slivers of the growth for analysis. Back in her lab she would attack them with various viral weapons, hoping to find one which had an edge on the growth. She knew from experience that the routine was largely futile—the growth had a fantastic capacity for corrupting the molecular tools with which she probed it. Not that there was any pressing hurry: the reefer kept Brannigan at only a few hundred millikelvin above absolute zero, and that cold did appear to offer some hindrance to the spread. On the negative side, Volyova knew that no human being had ever survived revival from such a cold, but that seemed oddly irrelevant against the Captain’s condition.

Ng managed to sound as if the act of waking up was an outmoded physical affectation he had long since discarded, like owning an appendix. Which was entirely possible: Khouri had never got a good look at the man inside the box. Hermetics were one of the more peculiar post-plague castes to emerge in the last few years. Reluctant to discard the implants which the plague might have corrupted, and convinced that traces of it still lingered even in the relative cleanliness of the Canopy, they never left their boxes unless the environment itself was hermetically sealed; limiting their mobility to a few orbital carousels.

Amarantin writing was not, however, like anything in human experience. All Amarantin texts were stereoscopic—consisting of interlaced lines which had to be merged in the reader’s visual cortex. Their ancestors had once been something like birds—flying dinosaurs, but with the intelligence of lemurs. At some point in their past their eyes had been situated on opposite sides of their skulls, leading to a highly bicameral mind, each hemisphere synthesising its own mental model of the world. Later, they had become hunters and evolved binocular vision, but their mental wiring still owed something to that earlier phase of development. Most Amarantin artefacts mirrored their mental duality, with a pronounced symmetry about the vertical axis.

Now even the locals were admitting that the place had seen better days. With little in the way of irony they were calling it the City That Never Wakes Up, because so many thousands of its one-time rich were now frozen in cryocrypts, skipping centuries in the hope that this period was only an aberration in the city’s fortunes.

The city stretched away infinitely in all directions, it seemed, a dense wood of gnarled interlaced buildings gradually lost in murk. The very oldest structures were still more or less intact: boxlike buildings which had retained their shapes during the plague because they had never contained any systems of self-repair or redesign. The modern structures, by contrast, now resembled odd, up-ended pieces of driftwood or wizened old trees in the last stages of rot. Once those skyscrapers had looked linear and symmetrical, until the plague made them grow madly, sprouting bulbous protrusions and tangled, leprous appendages. The buildings were all dead now, frozen into the shapes which seemed calculated to induce disquiet. Slums adhered to their sides, lower levels lost in a scaffolded maze of shanty towns and ramshackle bazaars, aglow with naked fires. Tiny figures were moving in the slums, walking or rickshawing to business along haphazard roadways laid down over old ruins. There were very few powered vehicles, and most of the contraptions Khouri saw looked like they were steam-driven.

The slums never reached more than ten levels up the sides of the buildings before collapsing under their own weight, so for two or three hundred further metres the buildings rose smoothly, relatively unscathed by plague transformations. There was no evidence of occupation in these mid-city levels. It was only near the very tops that human presence again re-asserted itself: tiered structures perched like cranes’ nests among the branches of the malformed buildings. These new additions were aglow with conspicuous wealth and power; bright apartment windows and neon advertisements. Searchlights swept down from the eaves, sometimes picking out the tiny forms of other cable-cars, navigating between districts. The cable-cars picked their way through a network of fine branches, lacing the buildings like synaptic threads. The locals had a name for this high-level city-within-a-city: the Canopy.

This was to be the venue for the kill, apparently. It was unusual to know that in advance, unless it was another thing that Taraschi had actually had written into his contract. Contracting to be hunted by a Shadowplay assassin was only usually done if the client thought that they stood a good chance of evading the pursuer over the period determined by the contract. It was the way the virtually immortal rich kept ennui at bay, forcing their behaviour patterns out of predictable ruts—and ending up with something to brag about when they outlived the contract, as the majority did.

Until that moment when the Ice Mendicant explained the situation to her, Khouri had never really given much thought to the slowness of light. There was nothing in the universe that moved faster… but, as she now saw, it was glacial compared to the speed that would be needed to keep their love alive. In one instant of cruel clarity, she understood that it was nothing less than the underlying structure of the universe, its physical laws, which had conspired to bring her to this moment of horror and loss. It would have been so much easier, infinitely easier, if she had known he was dead. Instead, there was this terrible gulf of separation, as much in time as in space. Her anger had become something sharp inside her, something that needed release if it was not going to kill her from within. Later that day, when the man came to offer her a job as a contract assassin, she found it surprisingly easy to accept. The man’s name was Tanner Mirabel; like her he was an ex-soldier from the Edge. He was a kind of talent scout for potential new assassins. His network taps had flagged her soldiering skills as soon as she was defrosted. Mirabel gave her a business contact: a Mr. Ng, a prominent hermetic. An interview with Ng swiftly followed, then a spread of psychometric tests. Assassins, it turned out, had to be among the sanest, most analytic people on the planet. They had to know exactly when a kill would be legal—and when it would cross the sometimes blurred line into murder and send a ...

It was here, also, that she had kept Nagorny’s head since killing him. It was frozen, of course; entombed within a space helmet of old design which had gone into emergency cryopreservation mode the instant it detected that its occupant was no longer living. Volyova had heard of helmets with razor-sharp irises built into the neck, which quickly and cleanly detached the head from the rest of the body in dire circumstances—but this had not been one of those.

With nothing in the way of ceremony—not even a goodbye—Nagorny pushed Volyova into the hole. It was a dreadful mistake. The shaft threaded the ship from top to bottom; she had kilometres to fall before she hit the bottom. And for a few almost heart-stopping moments, she had assumed that was exactly what would happen. She would drop until she hit—and whether it took a few seconds or the better part of a minute was of no consequence at all. The walls of the shaft were sheer and frictionless; there was no way to gain a purchase or arrest her fall in any way whatsoever. She was going to die. Then—with a detachment which later shocked her—part of her mind had re-examined the problem. She had seen herself, not falling through the ship, but stationary: floating in absolute rest with respect to the stars. What moved, instead, was the ship: rushing upwards around her. She was not accelerating at all now—and the only thing that made the ship accelerate was its thrust. Which she could control from her bracelet.

It had not been easy—the rush of air had almost drowned out her voice as she screamed the appropriate instructions into the bracelet. Agonising moments had followed before the ship seemed to take any notice of her. Then—dutifully—it had moved to her whim. Later, she had found Nagorny. The ten gees of thrust, sustained for a second, would not ordinarily have been fatal. Volyova had, however, not whittled her speed down to zero in one go. She had achieved that through trial and error, and with each impulse Nagorny had been flung between ceiling and floor.

One of the shafts of light falling from the ceiling shifted magically onto him. It was only an instant, but long enough for her to raise the toxin gun. She fired. “You did well,” Taraschi said, no pain showing in his voice. He reached out with one hand to steady himself against the wall. The other touched the swordfish protruding from his chest and prised it free, as if picking a thistle from his clothes. The pointed husk dropped to the floor, serum glistening from the end. Khouri raised the toxin gun again, but Taraschi warded her off with a blood-smeared palm. “Don’t overdo it,” he said. “One should be sufficient.” Khouri felt nauseous. “Shouldn’t you be dead?” “Not for a little while. Months, to be precise. The toxin is very slow-acting. Plenty of time to think it over.” “Think what over?” Taraschi raked his wet hair and wiped dust and blood from his hands onto the shins of his trousers. “Whether I follow her.”

“This was my mother,” Taraschi said, gesturing at the nearest shrine. It was one of the few that were well-tended. There was no dust at all on the woman’s alabaster bust, as if Taraschi had cleaned it himself just before their meeting. Her skin was uncorrupted and her jewelled eyes were still present, aristocratic features unmarred by dent or blemish. “Nadine Weng-da Silva Taraschi.” “What happened to her?” “She died, of course, in the process of being scanned. The destructive mapping was so swift that half her brain was still functioning normally while the other half was torn apart.” “I’m sorry—even though I know she volunteered for it.” “Don’t be. She was actually one of the lucky ones. Do you know the story, Ana?” “I’m not from around here.” “No; that was what I heard—that you were a soldier once, and that something terrible happened to you. Well, let me tell you this much. The scannings were all successful. The problem lay in the software which was supposed to execute the scanned information; to allow the alphas to evolve forward in time and experience awareness, emotion, memory—everything that makes us human. It worked well enough until the last of the Eighty had been scanned, a year after the first. But then strange pathologies began to emerge amongst the early volunteers. They crashed irrecoverably, or locked themselves in infinite loops.” “You said she was lucky?” “A few of the Eighty are still running,” Taraschi said. “They’ve managed to keep doing so for a centur...

A palanquin emerged from between two shrines. “Case?” She lowered the gun—it was of little use anyway, with the toxin keyed so precisely to Taraschi’s biochemistry. But this was not Case’s palanquin: it was unmarked, unornamented black. And now it opened—she had never seen a palanquin do that—divulging a man who stepped fearlessly towards her. He wore a plum matador’s jacket; not the hermetic clothing she might have expected from someone who feared the plague. In one hand he carried a fashion accessory: a tiny camera. “Case has been taken care of,” the man said. “He’s of no concern to you from now on, Khouri.” “Who are you—someone connected to Taraschi?” “No—I just came along to see if you were as efficient as your reputation implied.” The man spoke with a soft accent which was not local—not from this system, nor the Edge. “And, I’m afraid, you were. Which means—as of now—you’re working for the same employer as myself.” She wondered if she could put a dart in his eye. It would not kill him, but it might take the edge off his cockiness. “And who would that be?” “The Mademoiselle,” the man said. “I’ve never heard of her.” He raised the lensed end of the little camera. It split open like a particularly ingenious Fabergé egg, hundreds of elegant jade fragments sliding to new positions. Suddenly she was looking down the barrel of a gun. “No, but she’s heard of you.”

Volyova was working near the cache one day, thinking of weapons, when a janitor-rat dropped gently onto her shoulder and spoke into her ear. “Company,” said the rat. The rats were a peculiar quirk of the Nostalgia for Infinity; quite possibly unique aboard any lighthugger. They were only fractionally more intelligent than their feral ancestors, but what made them useful—what turned them from pest into utility—was that they were biochemically linked into the ship’s command matrix. Every rat had specialised pheromonal receptors and transmitters which allowed it to receive commands and transmit information back to the ship, encoded into complex secreted molecules. They foraged for waste, eating virtually anything organic which was not nailed down or still breathing. Then they ran some rudimentary preprocessing in their guts before going elsewhere in the ship, excreting pellets into larger recycler systems. Some of them had even been equipped with voiceboxes and a small hardwired lexicon of useful phrases, triggered into vocalisation when external stimuli satisfied biochemically programmed conditions. In Volyova’s case, she had programmed the rats to alert her as soon as they began to process human detritus—dead skin cells, and the like—which had not come from her. She would know when the other crew members were awake, even if she was in a completely different district of the ship. “Company,” the rat squeaked again. “Yes, I heard first time.” She lowered the little rodent to t...

Deliberately she sat between the two other women: Sudjic and Kjarval. Both were currently black-skinned and bald, apart from fiery tangles of dreadlocks erupting from their crowns. Dreadlocks were important to Ultras: they symbolised the number of reefersleep stints that each had done; the number of times each had almost kissed the speed of light. The two women had joined after their own ship had been pirated by Volyova’s crew. Ultras traded loyalties as easily as the water ice, monopoles and data they used for currency. Both were overt chimerics, although their transformations were modest compared to Hegazi. Sudjic’s arms vanished below her elbows into elaborately engraved bronze gauntlets, inlaid with ormoluwork windows which revealed constantly shifting holographics, diamond nails projecting from the too-slender fingers of her mock hands. Most of Kjarval’s body was organic, but her eyes were feline crosshatched red ellipses, and her flat nose exhibited no nostrils; merely sleekly rilled apertures, as if she was partially adapted to aquatic living. She wore no clothes, but apart from eyes, nostrils, mouth and ears, her skin was seamless, like an all-enveloping sheath of ebony neoprene. Her breasts lacked nipples; her fingers were dainty but without nails, and her toes were little more than vague suggestions, as if she had been rendered by a sculptor anxious to begin another commission. As Volyova sat down, Kjarval observed her with indifference that was a little too stud...

A hermetic’s palanquin had entered the room. Or had it been here all along, concealed by some artifice? It was as dark and angular as a metronome, lacking ornamentation, and with a roughly welded black exterior. It had no appendages or obvious sensors, and the tiny viewing monocle set into its front was as dark as a shark’s eye. “You are doubtless already familiar with my kind,” said the voice emanating from the palanquin. “Do not be disturbed.” “I’m not,” Khouri said. But she was lying. There was something disturbing about this box; a quality she had never experienced in the presence of Ng or the other hermetics she had known. Perhaps it was the austerity of the palanquin, or the sense—entirely subliminal—that the box was seldom unoccupied. None of this was helped by the smallness of the viewing window, or the feeling that there was something monstrous behind that dark opacity.

Volyova introduced herself. “You last visited this system in… let me see.” The face looked down for a moment. “Eighty-five years ago; ’461. Am I correct?” Against her best instincts, Volyova leaned nearer the screen. “Of course you’re correct. You’re a gamma-level simulation. Now dispense with the theatrics and just get on with it. I’ve wares to trade and every second you detain me is a second more we have to pay to park our ship around your useless dog-turd of a planet.” “Truculence noted,” the woman said, seeming to jot a remark in a notebook just out of sight. “For your information, Yellowstone records are incomplete in many areas owing to the data corruption of the plague. When I asked you the question I did so because I wanted to confirm an unverified record.” She paused. “And by the way; my name is Vavilov. I’m sitting with a rancid cup of coffee and my last cigarette in a draughty office eight hours into a ten-hour shift. My boss will assume I was dozing if I don’t turn back ten people today and so far I’ve only notched up five. With two hours to go I’m looking at ways to fill my quota, so please, think very carefully before your next outburst.” The woman took a drag and blew the smoke in Volyova’s direction. “Now. Shall we continue?” “I’m sorry, I thought—” Volyova trailed off. “Your people don’t use simulations for this kind of work?” “We used to,” Vavilov said, with a long-suffering sigh. “But the trouble with simulations is that they put up with far too much shit.”

At least half the people Volyova saw were Ultranauts, evidenced by their tendency towards paleness, spindly build, flaunted body augmentations, swathes of black leather and acres of glinting jewellery, tattoos and trade-trophies. None of the Ultras she saw were extreme chimerics, with the possible exception of Hegazi, who probably qualified as one of the half-dozen most augmented people in the carousel. But the majority wore their hair in the customary Ultra manner, fashioned in thick braids to indicate the number of reefersleep stretches they had done, and many of them had their clothes slashed to expose their prosthetic parts. Looking at these specimens, Volyova had to remind herself that she was part of the same culture. Ultras, of course, were not the only spacegoing faction spawned by humanity. Skyjacks—at least here—made up a significant portion of the others she saw. They were spacedwellers to be sure, but they did not crew interstellar ships and so their outlook was very different to the wraithlike Ultras, with their dreadlocks and old-fashioned expressions. There were others still. Icecombers were a Skyjack offshoot; psychomodified for the extreme solitude which came from working the Kuiper belt zones, and they kept themselves to themselves with ferocious dedication. Gillies were aquatically modified humans who breathed liquid air; capable of crewing short-range, high-gee ships: they constituted a sizeable fraction of the system’s police force. Some gillies were s...

He fell into his past again. Deeper this time; back to when he was twelve. Pascale’s flashbacks were non-sequential; the biography was constructed with no regard for the niceties of linear time. At first he was disorientated, even though he was the one person in the universe who ought not to have been adrift in his own history. But the confusion slowly gave way to the realisation that her way was the right one; that it was right to treat his past as shattered mosaic of interchangeable events; an acrostic embedded with numerous equally legitimate interpretations.

Lascaille—or what remained of Lascaille—was returned to the Yellowstone system, and then to the SISS habitat, where medical experts desperately tried to construct a theory for what might have happened. Eventually—and it was more out of desperation than logic—they decided that the fractal, restructured spacetime around the Shroud had not been able to support the information density of his brain. In passing through it, his mind had been randomised on the quantum level, although the molecular processes of his body had not been noticeably affected. He was like a text which had been transcribed imprecisely—so that much of the meaning was lost—and then retranscribed.

“Where do the Jugglers come into it?” “The Pattern Jugglers have been around for a long time and they’re to be found on many worlds. All starfaring cultures in this part of the galaxy encounter them sooner or later.” Lascaille tapped his sketch. “Just like we did, so did the Shrouders, only very much earlier. Do you understand what I’m saying, Doctor?” “Yes…” He thought he did, anyway. “But not the point of it.” Lascaille smiled. “Whoever—or whatever—visits the Jugglers is remembered by them. Remembered absolutely, that is—down to the last cell; the last synaptic connection. That’s what the Jugglers are. A vast biological archiving system.” This was true enough, Sylveste knew. Humans had gleaned very little of significance concerning the Jugglers, their function or origin. But what had become clear almost from the outset was that the Jugglers were capable of storing human personalities within their oceanic matrix, so that anyone who swam in the Juggler sea—and was dissolved and reconstituted in the process—would have achieved a kind of immortality. Later, those patterns could be realised again; temporarily imprinted in the mind of another human. The process was muddy and biological, so the stored patterns were contaminated by millions of other impressions, each subtly influencing the other. Even in the early days of Juggler exploration it had been obvious that the ocean had stored patterns of alien thought; hints of otherness bleeding into the thoughts of the swimmers—but ...

“It would be within the capabilities of the Jugglers to instil a Shrouder neural transform within a human neocortex.” It was a chilling thought: achieve contact not by meeting an alien, but by becoming it. If that was what Lascaille meant. “How would that help us?” “It would stop the Shroud from killing you.” “I don’t follow you.” “Understand that the Shroud is a protective structure. What lies within are… not just the Shrouders themselves, but technologies which are simply too powerful to be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. Over millions of years, the Shrouders combed the galaxy seeking harmful things left over by extinct cultures—things which I can almost not even begin to describe to you. Things which may once have served good, but which are also capable of being used as weapons of unimaginable horror. Technologies and techniques which may only be deployed by ascended races: means of manipulating spacetime, or of moving faster-than-light… other things which your mind literally can’t encompass.” Sylveste wondered if that really were the case. “Then the Shrouds are—what? Treasure chests, where only the most advanced races get the keys?” “More than that. They defend themselves against intruders. A Shroud’s boundary is almost a living thing. It responds to the thought patterns of those who enter it. If the patterns do not resemble those of the Shrouders… it fights back. It alters spacetime locally, creating vicious eddies of curvature. Curvature equals gravitational sh...

The Jugglers had been a curiosity for more than a century. They existed on a number of worlds, all of them dominated by single planet-sized oceans. The Jugglers were a biochemical consciousness distributed through each ocean, composed of trillions of co-acting micro-organisms, arranged into island-sized clumps. All the Jugglers’ worlds were tectonically active, and it was theorised that the Jugglers drew their energy from hydrothermal outlet vents on the seabed; that the heat was converted to bioelectrical energy and transferred to the surface via tendrils of organic superconductor draping down through kilometres of black cold. The Jugglers’ purpose—assuming they had a purpose—remained completely unknown. It was clear that they had the ability to mediate the biospheres of the worlds in which they had been seeded, acting like a single, intelligently acting mass of phytoplankton—but no one knew if this was merely secondary to some hidden, higher function. What was known—and again not properly understood—was that the Jugglers had the capacity to store and retrieve information, acting like a single, planet-wide neural net. This information was stored on many levels, from the gross connectivity patterns of surface-floating tendrils, down to free-floating strands of RNA. It was impossible to say where the oceans began and the Jugglers ended—just as it was impossible to say whether each world contained many Jugglers or merely one arbitrarily extended individual, for the islands t...

The Mademoiselle stood next to the Komuso, hands clasped matronly behind her back, dressed in a floorlength electric-blue gown, black hair pulled into a severe bun. “You’re much too tense,” she said. “Volyova will suspect you have something to hide.” “Go away.” Volyova glanced in her direction. “Did you say something?” “I said it’s cold in here.” Volyova seemed to take far too long to digest the statement. “Yes. I suppose it is.” “You don’t have to speak out loud,” the Mademoiselle replied. “You don’t even have to subvocalise. Just imagine yourself speaking what you wish me to hear. The implant detects the ghost impulses generated in your speech area. Go on; try it.” “Go away,” Khouri said, or rather imagined herself thinking it. “Get the hell out of my head. This was never in the contract.” “My dear,” the Mademoiselle said, “there never was any contract, merely a—what shall I say? A gentlewomen’s agreement?” She looked directly at Khouri as if expecting some kind of response. Khouri merely stared, venomously. “Oh, very well,” the woman said. “But I promise you I shall be back before very long.” She popped out of existence.

Before very long they reached the hub, cleared customs and boarded the shuttle, a non-atmospheric craft consisting of a sphere with four thruster pods splayed out at right angles. The ship was called the Melancholia of Departure, the kind of ironic name Ultras favoured for their craft. The interior had the ribbed look of a whale’s gut. Volyova told her to go forward through a series of bulkheads and gullet-like crawlspaces until they reached the thing’s bridge. There were a few bucket seats, together with a console displaying reams of avionics gibberish, latticed by delicate entoptics. Volyova thumbed one of the visual readouts, causing a small, traylike device to chug out of a black recess in the side of the console. The tray was gridded with an oldstyle keyboard. Volyova’s fingers danced on the keys, causing a subtle change to sweep through the avionics data. Khouri realised with a tingling feeling that the woman had no implants; that her fingers were actually one of the ways by which she communicated.

That was the trouble with lighthuggers. No individual, no matter how powerful, could ever own one now unless it had already been in their possession for centuries. The Conjoiners were no longer manufacturing drives and people who already owned ships were in no mind to sell them. Khouri knew that the Mademoiselle had not been searching passively. Nor had Volyova. Volyova—so the Mademoiselle said—had unleashed a search program into Yellowstone’s data network, what she called a bloodhound. A mere human—even a mere computerised monitor—could not have detected the dog’s elaborate sniffing. But the Mademoiselle was seemingly neither of these things, and she sensed the dog the way a pond-skater feels ripples in the membrane on which it walks. What she did next was clever. She whistled to the bloodhound until it came bounding towards her. Then she casually broke the thing’s neck, but not before she had flensed it open and examined its informational innards, working out just what it was that the dog had been sent to find. The gist was that the dog had been sent to retrieve supposedly secret information relating to individuals who had had slaver experience; exactly what one would have expected from a group of Ultras who were searching for a crewperson to fill a vacancy on their ship. But there was something else. Something a tiny bit strange, which pricked the Mademoiselle’s curiosity. Why were they looking for someone with military activity in their backgrounds? Perhaps they were d...

The Mademoiselle repeated her smile, maddeningly. Like many beta-level sims, her compendium of facial expressions was small enough to make repetition inevitable, like a bad actor constantly falling into the same characterisations.

Now they were approaching Volyova’s ship. The thing, like all the other lighthuggers, was improbably streamlined. Space only approximated a vacuum at slow speeds. Up near lightspeed—which was where these ships spent most of their time—it was like cutting through a howling gale of atmosphere. That was why they looked like daggers: conic hull tapering to a needle-sharp prow to punch the interstellar medium, with two Conjoiner engines braced at the back on spars like an ornate hilt. The ship was sheathed in ice, so glisteningly pure that it looked like diamond. The shuttle swooped in low over Volyova’s ship, and for a moment Khouri apprehended the ship’s vastness. It was like flying over a city, not another vessel. Then a door irised open in the hull, revealing a glowing docking bay. Volyova guided the shuttle home with expert taps on her thruster controls, latching onto a berthing cradle. Khouri heard thumps as umbilicals and docking connectors thudded home.

It’s about time you stopped thinking of him as your worst enemy, you know.” They stepped into the sterile hush of the waiting car. The vehicle was adapted from one of the smaller surface exploration buggies, four balloon wheels at the extremities of its air-smoothed body, comms gear stowed in a matt-black hump on the roof. It was painted Inundationist purple, with Hokusai wave pendants mounted on the front. “If it wasn’t for my father,” Pascale continued, “you’d have died during the coup. He protected you from your worst enemies.” “That doesn’t make him a very competent revolutionary.” “And what does that say about the regime he managed to overthrow?” Sylveste shrugged. “Fair point, I suppose.”

“Has it occurred to you that they might have their own agenda? You know what Volyova said just before I was knocked out? She said I was the new Gunnery Officer. What do you suppose she meant by that?” “It explains why they were looking for military experience in your background.” “And what if I don’t go along with her plans?” “I doubt it matters to her.” The Mademoiselle stopped her strolling, adopting an expression of seriousness from her internal compendium of facial modes. “They’re Ultras, you see. Ultras have access to technologies considered taboo on colony worlds.” “Such as?” “Instruments for manipulating loyalty might be among them.” “Well, thanks for giving me this important information well in advance.” “Don’t worry—I always knew there was a chance of this.” The Mademoiselle paused and touched the side of her own head. “I took precautions accordingly.” “That’s a relief.” “The implant I put inside you will fabricate antigens for their neural medichines. More than that, it will also broadcast subliminal reinforcement messages into your subconscious mind. Volyova’s loyalty therapies will be completely neutralised.” “So why bother even telling me this is going to happen?” “Because, dear girl, once Volyova begins the treatment, you’ll have to let her think it’s working.”

“But why object to a statue of a god with a pair of wings? Humans have never had wings, but that’s never stopped us investing angels with them. It strikes me that a species which really did once have wings would have even fewer qualms.” “Yes, except you’re forgetting the creation myth.” It was only in the last years that the basic myth had been understood by the archaeologists; unravelled from dozens of later, embroidered versions. According to the myth, the Amarantin had once shared the sky with the other birdlike creatures which still existed on Resurgam during their reign. But the flocks of that time were the last to know the freedom of flight. They made an agreement with the god they called Birdmaker, trading the ability to fly for the gift of sentience. On that day, they raised their wings to heaven and watched as consuming fire turned them to ash, for ever excluding them from the air. So that they might remember their arrangement, the Birdmaker gave them useless, clawed wing-stubs—enough to remind them of what they had forsaken, and enough to enable them to begin writing down their history. Fire burned in their minds too, but this was the unquenchable fire of being. That light would always burn, the Birdmaker told them—so long as they did not try to defy the Birdmaker’s will by once more returning to the skies. If they did that, it was promised, the Birdmaker would take back the souls they had been given on the Day of Burning Wings. It was, Sylveste knew, simply the ...

Never quite forgetting that she was aboard a ship (it was the ever-so-slightly irregular pattern of the induced gravity, caused by tiny imbalances in the thrust stream, which in turn reflected mysterious quantum capriciousness in the bowels of the Conjoiner drives) Volyova entered the green seclusion of the glade alone and hesitated at the top of the rustic staircase which led down to the grass. If Sajaki was aware of her presence, he chose not to show it, kneeling silently and motionlessly next to the gnarled tree stump which was their informal meeting place. But he undoubtedly sensed her. Volyova knew that Sajaki had visited the Pattern Jugglers on the aquatic world Wintersea, accompanying Captain Brannigan, back when Captain Brannigan was capable of leaving the ship. She did not know what the purpose of that trip had been—for either of them—but there had been rumours that the Pattern Jugglers had tampered with his neocortex, embossing neural patterns which configured an unusual degree of spatial awareness: the ability to think in four or five dimensions. The patterns had been the rarest kind of Juggler transform: one that lingered.

Sajaki led them through gloomy grey-green lit corridors, huge and perhaps mutant janitor-rats scrabbling away as their footfalls neared. What he took them into resembled the inside of a choleraic’s trachea—corridors thick and glutinous with dirty carapacial ice; venous with buried tentacular ducts and power lines, slick with something nastily like human phlegm. Ship-slime, Volyova called it—an organic secretion caused by malfunctioning biological recycler systems on an adjacent level. Mostly, though, it was the cold of which Khouri took heed. “Sylveste’s part in things is rather complex,” Sajaki said. “It’ll take a while to explain. First, though, I’d like you to meet the Captain.”

Together, they stepped into the glare, into the basso sound-field of the organ’s drone. A meandering path led to the central temple, carpeted for the occasion. Chime-trees lined it, cased in protective domes of clear plastic. The chime-trees were spindly, articulated sculptures, their many arms tipped with curved, coloured mirrors. At odd times, the trees would click and reconfigure themselves, moved by what seemed to be million-year-old clockwork buried in pedestals. Current thinking had it that the trees were elements of some city-wide semaphore system. The organ’s noise magnified as they stepped into the temple. Its egg-shaped dome was permeated by petal-shaped expanses of elaborate stained-glass, miraculously intact despite the slow predations of time and gravity. Filtered through the toplights, the air in the temple seemed suffused with a calming pink radiance. The central portion of the enormous room was taken up by the rising foundation of the spire which rose above the temple; wide and flared like the base of a sequoia.

“I am Daniel Calvin Lorean Soutaine-Sylveste,” he said, using the form of his name so rarely employed that it almost took an effort of memory to bring it to mind. He went on, “The only biological son of Rosalyn Soutaine and Calvin Sylveste, both of Chasm City, Yellowstone. I was born on the seventeenth of January, in the hundred and twenty-first standard year after the resettlement of Yellowstone. My calendrical age is two hundred and twenty-three. Allowing for medichine programs, I have a physiological age of sixty, on the Sharavi scale.” “How do you knowingly manifest?” “I knowingly manifest in one incarnation only, the biological form now speaking.” “And you affirm that you are not wittingly manifested via alpha-level or other Turing-capable simulacra, in this or any other solar system?” “None of which I am aware.” Massinger made small annotations in the book using a pressure stylus. She had asked Girardieau precisely the same questions: standard parts of the Stoner ceremony. Ever since the Eighty, Stoners had been intensely suspicious of simulations in general, particularly those that purported to contain the essence or soul of an individual. One thing they especially disliked was the idea of one manifestation of an individual—biological or otherwise—making contracts to which the other manifestations were not bound, such as marriage. “These details are in order,” Massinger said. “The bride may step forward.” Pascale moved into the roseate light. She was accompanied by ...

“He was already over a century old before he ever left Sol system,” Sajaki said. “He waited until it was possible to do so, then was among the first thousand to leave, when the Conjoiners launched the first ship from Phobos.” “At least, someone called John Brannigan was on that ship,” Volyova said. “No,” Sajaki said. “There’s no doubt. I know it was him. Afterwards… it becomes less easy to place him, of course. He may have deliberately blurred his own past, to avoid being tracked down by all the enemies he must have made in that time. There are many sightings, in many different systems, decades apart… but nothing definite.” “How did he come to be your Captain?” “He turned up centuries later—after several landfalls elsewhere, and dozens of unconfirmed apparitions—on the fringe of the Yellowstone system. He was ageing slowly, due to the relativistic effects of starflight, but he was still getting older, and longevity techniques were not as well developed as in our time.” Sajaki paused. “Much of his body was now prosthetic. They said that John Brannigan no longer needed a spacesuit when he left his ship; that he breathed vacuum, basked in intolerable heat and quenching cold, and that his sensory range encompassed every spectrum imaginable. They said that little remained of the brain with which he had been born; that his head was merely a dense loom of intermeshed cybernetics, a stew of tiny thinking machines and precious little organic material.” “And how much of that was tru...

“Calvin took a few precautions before he subjected himself to the scanner,” Sajaki said. “The first was simple enough, although it had to be initiated decades before the culmination of the project. Simply put, he arranged to have every subsequent second of his life monitored by recording systems. Every second: waking, sleeping, whatever. Over the years, machines learnt to emulate his behaviour patterns. Given any situation, they could predict his responses with astonishing accuracy.” “Beta-level simulation.” “Yes, but a beta-level sim orders of magnitude more complex than any previously created.” “By some definitions,” Volyova said, “it was already conscious; Calvin had already transmigrated. Calvin may or may not have believed that, but he still kept on refining the sim. It could project an image of Calvin which was so real, so like the actual man, that you had the forceful sense that you were really in his presence. But Calvin took it a step further. There was another mode of insurance available to him.” “Which was?” “Cloning.” Sajaki smiled, nodded almost imperceptibly in Volyova’s direction. “He cloned himself,” she said. “Using illegal black genetics techniques, calling in favours from some of his shadier clients. Some of them were Ultra, you see—otherwise we wouldn’t know any of this. Cloning was embargoed technology on Yellowstone; young colonies almost always outlaw it in the interests of ensuring maximum genetic diversity. But Calvin was cleverer than the authorit...

“Your vials,” said the Ordinator. One of the wimpled aides from Pascale’s party stepped forward, brandishing a vial identical in size and shape to the one which Sylveste removed from his pocket. They were not the same colour: the fluid in Pascale’s vial had been tinted red, against the yellow hue of Sylveste’s. Similar darkish fronds of material orbited within. The Ordinator took both vials and held them aloft for a few moments before placing them side by side on the table, in clear view of the audience. “We are ready to begin the marriage,” she said. She then performed the customary duty of asking if there were anyone present who had any bioethical reasons as to why the marriage should not take place. There was, of course, no objection. But in that odd, loaded moment of branching possibilities, Sylveste noted a veiled woman in the audience reach into a purse and uncap a dainty, jewel-topped amber perfume jar. “Daniel Sylveste,” said the Ordinator. “Do you take this woman to be your wife, under Resurgam law, until such time as this marriage is annulled under this or any prevailing legal system?” “I do,” Sylveste said. She repeated the question to Pascale. “I do,” Pascale said. “Then let the bonding be done.” Ordinator Massinger took the wedding gun from the mahogany box and snapped it open. She loaded the reddish vial—the one Pascale’s party had delivered—into the breech, then reclosed the instrument. Status entoptics briefly haloed it. Girardieau placed his hand on Sylves...

Which was when the perfume hit Janequin’s birds. The woman who had uncapped the amber jar was gone, her seat glaringly vacant. Fragrant, autumnal, the odour from the jar made Sylveste think of crushed leaves. He wanted to sneeze. Something was wrong. The room flashed turquoise blue, as if a hundred pastel fans had just opened. Peacocks’ tails, springing open. A million tinted eyes. The air turned grey. “Get down!” Girardieau screamed. He was scrabbling madly at his neck. There was something hooked in it, something tiny and barbed. Numbly, Sylveste looked at his tunic and saw half a dozen comma-shaped barbs clinging to it. They had not broken the fabric, but he dared not touch them. “Assassination tools!” Girardieau shouted. He slumped under the table, dragging Sylveste and his daughter with him. The auditorium was chaos now, a frenzied mass of agitated people trying to escape. “Janequin’s birds were primed!” Girardieau said, virtually screaming in Sylveste’s ear. “Poison darts—in their tails.” “You’re hit,” Pascale said, too stunned for her voice to carry much emotion. Light and smoke burst over their heads. They heard screams. Out of the corner of his eye, Sylveste saw the perfume woman holding a sleekly evil pistol in a two-handed grip. She was dousing the audience with it, its fanged barrel spitting cold pulses of boser energy. The float-cams swept round her, dispassionately recording the carnage. Sylveste had never seen a weapon like the one the woman used. He knew it ...

“I never believed he had real enemies,” Pascale said, her sentence seeming to writhe unattached in the confined space. He imagined her fear: without vision, with only his assurances, this dark place must be exquisitely frightening. “I never thought anyone would kill him for what they wanted. I didn’t think anything was worth that much.”

The gunnery was all, and that was why she no longer feared it. She was still herself after the sessions, and she began to think that the gunnery hardly mattered at all; that it would not ultimately make any difference to the outcome of her mission. All that changed when the dogs came home. They were the Mademoiselle’s bloodhounds: cybernetic agents she had unleashed into the gunnery during one of Khouri’s sessions. The dogs had clawed their way into the system itself via the neural interface, exploiting the system’s one forgivable weakness. Volyova had hardened it against software attack, but had obviously never imagined that the attack might come from the brain of the person hooked into the gunnery. The dogs barked back safe assurances that they had entered the gunnery’s core. They had not returned to Khouri during the session in which they were unleashed, since it would take more than a few hours for them to sniff every nook and cranny of the gunnery’s Byzantine architecture. So they had stayed in the system for more than a day, until Volyova once again hooked Khouri in. Then the dogs returned to the Mademoiselle, and she decrypted them and unravelled the prey they had located. “She has a stowaway,” the Mademoiselle said when she and Khouri were alone after a session. “Something has hidden itself in the gunnery system, and I’m prepared to bet she knows nothing about it at all.” Which was when Khouri stopped regarding the gunnery chamber with such total equanimity. “Go on...

What the Mademoiselle had to say related to the gunnery’s topology. The gunnery was an enormously complex assemblage of computers: layers accreted over decades of shiptime. It was doubtful that any one mind—even Volyova’s—could have grasped more than the very basics of that topology; how the various layers interpenetrated each other and folded back on themselves. But in one sense the gunnery was easy to visualise, since it was almost totally disconnected from the rest of the ship, which was why most of the higher cache-weapon functions could only be accessed by someone physically present in the gunnery seat. The gunnery was surrounded by a firewall, and data could only pass from the rest of the ship to the gunnery. The reasons for this were tactical; since the gunnery’s weapons (and not just those in the cache) would project outside the ship when they were used, they potentially offered routes for enemy weapons to penetrate the ship by viral means. So the gunnery was isolated: protected from the rest of the ship’s dataspace by a one-way trapdoor. The door only allowed data to enter the gunnery from the rest of the ship; nothing within the gunnery could traverse it. “Now,” said the Mademoiselle, “given that we have discovered something in the gunnery, I invite you to draw the logical conclusion.” “Whatever it was got there by mistake.” “Yes.” The Mademoiselle sounded pleased, almost as if the thought had not struck her. “I suppose we must consider the possibility that the e...

“You mentioned the thing was hostile,” she said carefully, not really sure she wanted to ask any more questions, in case the answers were too difficult to assimilate. “Yes.” Hesitating now. “The dogs were a mistake,” she said. “I was too impetuous. I should have realised that Sun Stealer—” “Sun Stealer?” “What it calls itself. The stowaway, I mean.” This was bad. How did she know the thing’s name? Fleetingly, Khouri remembered that Volyova had once asked her if that name meant anything to her. But there was more to it than that. It was as if she had been hearing that name in her dreams for some time now. Khouri opened her mouth to speak, but the Mademoiselle was already talking. “It used the dogs to escape, Khouri. Or at least for a part of itself to escape. It used them to get into your head.”

Khouri had been hoping for some mental breathing-space, some time in which to collect her thoughts, in which to listen quietly for the breathing of the invasive presence in her head. But the Mademoiselle was still speaking. “I believe Sun Stealer has already attempted this once before,” she said. “I’m speaking of your predecessor, of course.” “You mean the stowaway tried to get into Nagorny’s head?” “Exactly that. Except in Nagorny’s case, there would have been no bloodhounds on which to hitch a ride. Sun Stealer must have had to resort to something cruder.” Khouri considered what she had learnt from Volyova about this whole incident. “Crude enough to drive Nagorny mad?” “Evidently so,” her companion nodded. “And perhaps Sun Stealer only attempted to impose his will on the man. Escape from the gunnery was impossible, so Sun Stealer merely tried to make Nagorny his puppet. Perhaps it was all done via subconscious suggestion, while he was in the gunnery.” “Exactly how much trouble am I in?” “Little, for now. There were only a few dogs—not enough for him to do much damage.” “What happened to the dogs?” “I decrypted them, of course—learnt their messages. But in doing so, I opened myself up to him. To Sun Stealer. The dogs must have limited him somewhat, because his attack on me was far from subtle. Fortunately, because otherwise I might not have deployed my defences in time. He was not particularly hard to defeat, but of course I was only dealing with a tiny part of him.” “The...

Eventually—miraculously—it began to abate. It was like a vacuum opening in his mind, a cold, void-filled ventricle which had not been there before. Taking the pain away was like taking away some inner buttress. He felt himself collapsing, whole eavestones of his psyche grinding loose under their suddenly unsupported weight. It took an effort to restore some of his own internal equilibrium. And now there were colourless, evanescent ghosts in his vision. By the second they hardened into distinct shapes. The walls of a room—as bland and unfurnished as he had imagined—and a masked figure crouched low over him. Falkender’s hand was immersed in a kind of chrome glove which ended not in fingers but in a crayfish-like explosion of tiny glistening manipulators. One of the man’s eyes was monocled by a lens system, connected to the glove by a segmented steel cable. His skin had the pallor of a lizard’s underbelly: his one visible eye was unfocused and cyanotic. Dried specks of blood sprinkled his brow. The blood was grey-green, but Sylveste knew well enough what it was. In fact, now that he noticed, everything was grey-green. The glove retracted, and Falkender pulled it from his wrist with the other hand. A caul of lubricant sheened the hand which had been under the glove.

Volyova sat alone in the huge sphere of the bridge, under the holographic display of the Resurgam system. Her seat, like the other vacant ones around her, was mounted on a long, telescopic, highly articulated arm, so that it could be steered to almost any point in the sphere. Hand under chin, she had been staring into the orrery for hours, like a child transfixed by some glittery toy. Delta Pavonis was a chip of warm-red ambergris fixed at the middle, the system’s eleven major planets spaced around it on their respective orbits, positioned at their true positions; smears of asteroidal debris and comet-shards following their own ellipses; the whole orrery haloed by a tenuous Kuiper belt of icy flotsam; tugged into slight asymmetry by the presence of the neutron star which was Pavonis’s dark twin. The picture was a simulation, rather than an enlargement of what lay ahead. The ship’s sensors were acute enough to glean data at this range, but the view would have been distorted by relativistic effects, and—worse—would have been a snapshot of the system as it was years earlier, with the relative positions of the planets bearing no resemblance to the present situation. Since the ship’s approach strategy would depend critically on using the system’s larger gas giants for camouflage and gravitational braking, Volyova needed to know where things would be when they got there, not how they had been five years ago. And not only that. Before the ship arrived in the Resurgam system, its ...